Charles Otto Blagden (6 September 1864 – 25 August 1949)[1][2] was an English Orientalist and linguist who specialised in the Malay, Mon and Pyu languages.

[1] In 1888 Blagden was appointed to the Straits Settlements civil service in Malaya, where he held a number of administrative and judicial posts in Malacca and Singapore[3] In 1897 he returned to England due to ill health, and the following year he became a Holt Scholar of Gray's Inn in London.

In 1897 he was called to the bar, and for the next seventeen years he practiced law, co-authoring a number of legal works, whilst continuing to publish academic articles on Malay, Mon and Pyu.

[1] In 1916 the School of Oriental Studies (later School of Oriental and African Studies) was founded as a constituent college of the University of London, in order to promote the teaching of Asian languages and to train colonial officials for the British Empire, admitting its first students in January 1917.

[1] Blagden also cooperated with Evangeline Edwards on studies of Chinese vocabularies of Malacca Malay (1931) and Cham (1939).