Peter Ladefoged

Peter Ladefoged was the most important phonetician of the twentieth century. He conducted fieldwork on a large percentage of the world’s languages from every continent (especially North America and Africa) and headed up the UCLA phonetics archive. Ladefoged co-authored the classic phonetics textbook with Ian Maddieson, A Course in Phonetics, and his voice can still be heard pronouncing the symbols of the IPA chart for the CD that accompanies the textbook. The content of this CD is also available on the web, and the click-and-listen IPA chart with the format [Ca] / [aCa] for consonants and [V] for vowels is a commonly-used resource for learning the IPA in beginning linguistics classes. Although not the linguist parodied in the film, Ladefoged was the consultant during the making of the movie My Fair Lady.