Charles Albert Ferguson (July 6, 1921 – September 2, 1998) was an American linguist who taught at

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. He was one of the founders of

sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language changes between distinct social groups, as well as how it varies unde ...

and is best known for his work on

diglossia In linguistics, diglossia ( , ) is where two dialects or languages are used (in fairly strict compartmentalization) by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety (labeled "L" or "low" v ...

. The

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test was created under his leadership at the Center for Applied Linguistics in

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. Ferguson was also the leader of a team of linguists in

Ethiopia Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...

under the

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's Survey of Language Use and Language Teaching. One of the many publications that came out of this was his article proposing the Ethiopian Language Area (Ferguson 1976), an article that has become widely cited and an important milestone in the study of

contact linguistics Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact with and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum l ...

. Ferguson is best known for his seminal article on diglossia, published in 1959 and (reprinted since then in other publications) and frequently cited by others, listed by

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as having been cited over 9,000 times. Ferguson was also a major figure in the study of child phonology and led the Stanford Child Phonology Project from 1967 until 1990. He was honored with a two-volume collection of papers in a 1986

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, edited by Joshua A. Fishman and others. In 1952 he served on the Advisory Committee on Arabic and Persian Names, a committee established by the

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Life and education

Charles Albert Ferguson was born in

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, Pennsylvania in 1921. He had an early curiosity for language, system, and order which led him to explore foreign languages through Oriental Studies at the

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(BA 1942, MA 1943 with a thesis on the

Moroccan Arabic Moroccan Arabic ( ), also known as Darija ( or ), is the dialectal, vernacular form or forms of Arabic spoken in Morocco. It is part of the Maghrebi Arabic dialect continuum and as such is mutually intelligible to some extent with Algerian ...

Verb; PhD 1945 with a dissertation on Standard Colloquial Bengali)."Memorial resolution: Charles A. Ferguson (1921-1998)"
Stanford University news, Stanford Report, May 19, 1999

References

Writings by Ferguson

*Ferguson, Charles A. 1959. Diglossia. ''Word'' 15: 325-340. *Ferguson, Charles. 1976. The Ethiopian Language Area. ''Language In Ethiopia'', ed. by M. Lionel Bender, J. Donald Bowen, R.L. Cooper, Charles A. Ferguson, pp. 63–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press. *Ferguson, Charles. 1983. Reduplication in Child Phonology. Journal of Child Language 10:239-243. *Ferguson, Charles. 1988. Agreement in Natural Language. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.

Writings about Ferguson

*Croft, William. "Obituary: Joseph Harold Greenberg." ''Language'' 77, no. 4 (2001): 815-830. *Fishman, Joshua. 2000. "Obituary: Charles A. Ferguson, 1921-1998: An Appreciation," ''Journal of Sociolinguistics'' 4/1: 121-128. *Huebner, Thom. 1999
"Obituary Charles Albert Ferguson"
''Language in Society'' 28: 431-437. 1921 births 1998 deaths Stanford University Department of Linguistics faculty American sociolinguists Ethiopianists Linguistic Society of America presidents American expatriates in Ethiopia {{Africanist-stub