The father of the C programming language is Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie. He created C in the early 1970s at Bell Laboratories, primarily to develop the Unix operating system alongside his colleague Ken Thompson. Ritchie's work on C made it a powerful, efficient, and portable language that has had a profound and lasting impact on software development and operating systems. He is widely recognized as the principal designer and developer of C and is often called the "Father of C"