Stanley Ellis (linguist)
Stanley Ellis (18 February 1926 in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire – 31 October 2009 in Harrogate) was an English linguistics scholar and broadcaster, and an authority on English regional dialects.
Born in
He worked as principal researcher under Harold Orton on the four volume Survey of English Dialects. Ellis performed much of the field work this entailed, and many of his recordings and interviews are housed in the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture.[1] He went on to be a lecturer and senior lecturer in the School of English at Leeds.[2]
He was the first person to provide expert evidence for speaker identification in an English court,
After taking early retirement from his university post, Ellis continued to provide linguistic expertise as an expert witness in court cases.
From the 1980s, he presented a series of programmes on dialect for BBC Radio 4, entitled "Take a Place Like ..." and "Talk of the Town, Talk of the Country", and later was a host of radio phone-ins, discussing dialect and origins of names and placenames with callers, as well as contributing to programmes such as The Routes of English.[7]
In Talking for Britain: A Journey Through the Nation's Dialects (2005), Simon Elmes paid tribute to Ellis: 'Stanley's deep linguistic wisdom and his love of the British landscape – the people who live in it and who describe it in their talk – inspired me to pursue my own long fascination' (p. x).
He was awarded honorary life membership of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics in 2004.
References
- ^ "Tape Recording Transcriptions - Library | University of Leeds". explore.library.leeds.ac.uk. Retrieved 15 March 2024.
- ^ French, Peter (23 November 2009). "Stanley Ellis Obituary". University of Leeds. Archived from the original on 5 January 2010. Retrieved 20 August 2023.
- ^ a b Jack Windsor Lewis (13 November 2009). "Obituary: Stanley Ellis". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 August 2023.
- ^ The Yorkshire Ripper Hoax Tape
- ^ "In the News", The Reporter, issue 511 (University of Leeds newsletter)
- ^ The Higgins Boast, Jack Windsor Lewis, 10 November 2012
- ^ BBC – Radio 4 – Routes of English
External links
- Stanley Ellis – Daily Telegraph obituary