Peter Ladefoged

Peter Ladefoged was a British-American linguist and one of the leading phoneticians of the twentieth century, spending most of his career as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ladefoged authored A Course in Phonetics, first published in 1975, a widely used introductory textbook that remained a standard reference in the field through multiple later editions. Ladefoged conducted extensive field research documenting the sound systems of languages across Africa, India and elsewhere, often traveling to record speakers of endangered or under-documented languages using instrumental phonetic techniques, and this fieldwork contributed to the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database, a large cross-linguistic database of speech sounds used in typological research. Ladefoged's work combined rigorous acoustic and articulatory measurement with broad cross-linguistic comparison, and he served as an expert witness in forensic linguistics cases in addition to his academic research, applying phonetic analysis to questions of speaker identification.