Ian Maddieson

Ian Maddieson was born Tuesday, September 1, 1942, in Watford, on the northern fringe of London, England, and died on Sunday, February 2, 2025 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, of a sudden heart attack. Ian received a degree in English from Oxford University. He then taught for four years at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria before taking a one-year position at Indiana University. Research positions on projects at UCLA and Stanford followed, and he completed a Ph.D. in linguistics at UCLA in 1977. He remained at UCLA as adjunct faculty in phonetics until the end of 1999, doing research and occasionally teaching. He then moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until retiring and moving to Albuquerque in 2006.

Ian is best known as the author of Patterns of Sounds (1984) and as the co-author with Peter Ladefoged of The Sounds of the World's Languages (1996). The fieldwork research that he conducted took him to many far corners of the globe. A particularly rewarding relationship developed with the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage in Lyon, France, where he made several prolonged visits, and collaborated with researchers there on the development of an updated online database of the sounds of languages around the world.

Beyond phonetics and typology, Ian's true passion was ultrarunning. His proudest accomplishment was having completed the Western States Endurance Run ten times in under 24 hours, with an additional five finishes between 24 and 30 hours. He finished 34 other "standard" 100-mile races, as well as numerous shorter and longer events. He managed to continue racing up until the end, doing 100 miles at the Across the Years 6-day race from December 2024-January 2025.

Ian is remembered as a quiet, kind, unassuming person possessed of an astounding breadth and depth of knowledge about sounds in different languages. He is survived by his wife, Caroline Smith, of Albuquerque; and his sister, Beryl Crocker, of Eastbourne, England.