Charles Albert Ferguson (July 6, 1921 – September 2, 1998) was an American linguist who taught at Stanford University. He was one of the founders of

sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural Norm (sociology), norms, expectations, and context (language use), context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on languag ...

and is best known for his work on

diglossia In linguistics, diglossia () is a situation in which 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 ...

. The

TOEFL Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL ) is a standardized test to measure the English language ability of non-native speakers wishing to enroll in English-speaking universities. The test is accepted by more than 11,000 universities a ...

test was created under his leadership at the

Center for Applied Linguistics The Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) is a private, nonprofit organization founded in 1959 and headquartered in Washington, DC. Its mission is to promote language learning and cultural understanding. Its president and chief executive officer ...

Washington, DC ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan ...

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

Ethiopia Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...

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 The Ethiopian language area is a hypothesized linguistic area that was first proposed by Charles A. Ferguson (1970, 1976), who posited a number of phonological and morphosyntactic features that were found widely across Ethiopia and Eritrea, incl ...

(Ferguson 1976), an article that has become widely cited and an important milestone in the study of contact linguistics. Ferguson is also widely noted 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 6,000 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

festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the h ...

, edited by

Joshua A. Fishman Joshua Fishman (Yiddish: שיקל פֿישמאַן — Shikl Fishman; July 18, 1926 – March 1, 2015) was an American linguist who specialized in the sociology of language, language planning, bilingual education, and language and ethnicity. ...

and others. In 1952 he served on the Advisory Committee on Arabic and Persian Names, a committee established by the United States Board on Geographic Names.

Life and education

Charles Albert Ferguson was born in

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, largest city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the List of United States cities by population, sixth-largest city i ...

, 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

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

(BA 1942, MA 1943 with a thesis on the Moroccan Arabic 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

Life and education

References

Further reading