He was Professor of Phonetics at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught from 1962 to 1991. His book "A Course in Phonetics" is a common introductory text in phonetics, and "The Sounds of the World's Languages" (co-authored with Ian Maddieson) is widely regarded as a standard phonetics reference. Ladefoged also wrote several books on the phonetics of African languages. Prior to UCLA, he was a lecturer at the universities of Edinburgh, Scotland (1953–59, 1960–1) and Ibadan, Nigeria (1959–60).