Peter Ladefoged, UCLA professor emeritus of linguistics and the
foremost linguistic phonetician in the world, died in London on
Tuesday, Jan. 24, at the age of 80. Ladefoged was on his way home
from a research trip to India.
Ladefoged earned his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh
in 1959, and taught in Nigeria and Edinburgh before coming to UCLA
as an assistant professor of phonetics in 1962. He served as
chairman of the linguistics department from 1977 to 1980, and most
notably created and directed the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory until
his retirement in 1991.
His contributions to linguistics and phonetics are extensive
““ he wrote 10 books and 130 scholarly articles on the theory
and practice of phonetics. He also merged pioneering linguistic
fieldwork with linguistic theory to explore the classification of
human language sounds in an organized framework.
When Ladefoged entered the field in the late 1950s, he combined
linguistic fieldwork and phonetics in a new way, said UCLA
linguistics Professor Pat Keating in a press release.
“The thousands of UCLA students who took Linguistics 1
from Peter Ladefoged probably had no idea that their professor was
the president of the Linguistic Society of America or the
International Phonetic Association, but they knew why he had won
the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award,” she said.
Ladefoged’s impact even extended into the realm of
Hollywood motion pictures. Director George Cukor recruited
Ladefoged as a consultant for the 1964 film “My Fair
Lady,” and to teach actor Rex Harrison to behave like a
phonetician. Harrison went on to win an Oscar for the role of
Professor Henry Higgins.
Ladefoged and Ian Maddieson ““ a former colleague of
Ladefoged’s at UCLA ““ worked to salvage as much
information as possible from dying languages. Ladefoged once
described the loss of a language as “a loss of human culture
and a loss of a way of organizing life,” according to a press
release.
In order to study each language, the two researchers stayed in
villages all over the world for weeks at a time, living in tents or
sometimes in nearby missions. They recorded at least a half-dozen
speakers of both genders, made calibrated recordings of the
language’s sounds for analysis, photographed the speakers,
and even recorded oral and nasal airflow to document how sounds
were made.
The duo’s 1996 book, “The Sounds of the
World’s Languages,” remains the most comprehensive work
on the subject. Ladefoged’s other books are extremely
successful, and his “A Course in Phonetics” is one of
the most successful in the field of linguistics. His writings have
shaped the educations of generations of linguists.
Ladefoged is survived by his wife and colleague Jenny, to whom
he was married for over 50 years; their daughters Lise Friedman and
Katie Weiss; son Thegn; and five grandchildren.
With reports from Bruin wire services.