Lourdes Ortega (born 1962) is a Spanish-born American linguist. She is currently a professor of applied linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on second language acquisition and second language writing. She is noted for her work on second language acquisition and for recommending that syntactic complexity needs to be measured multidimensionally. Along with Cumming, Hyland, Kormos, Manchón, Matsuda, Polio, Storch and Verspoor, Ortega is considered as one of the most prominent researchers in second language writing.