Peter Ladefoged - Legacy

Legacy

During his academic career, Ladefoged was a worldwide field linguist, as he visited Nigeria, Botswana, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Senegal, India, Yemen, Papua New Guinea, Nepal, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Korea, Scotland, the Aleutians, and China. Much of his fieldwork remains unique to this day and he originated or refined many data collection and analytic techniques in the field. His classic 1996 Sounds of the World's Languages (with Ian Maddieson) summarized his knowledge of all the sounds he had studied and remains the definitive reference work. His 20 PhD students include such influential figures as Vicki Fromkin, John Ohala, Ian Maddieson, Louis Goldstein, and Cathe Browman. His textbook A Course in Phonetics, which is in its fifth edition, is the standard in phonetics.

Ladefoged also pioneered the use of state-of-the-art equipment in the field. His first portable phonetics lab that included a tape recorder and various scientific instruments weighed 100 pounds and required a porter but enabled him to do more than listen: He could take quantitative measurements, such as gauging how much air escaped from the nose or throat when a sound was made.

In an earlier trip to India, he recorded the Toda language, which is spoken by fewer than 1,000 people, as he documented its six trills produced by the tip of the tongue. In the Kalahari Desert, he studied the click sounds native to that part of Africa. The !Kung, whose members knew their language was vanishing, refused to cooperate because they did not want to reveal their culture to outsiders.