Career
Wells earned his BA at Cambridge, and his MA and Ph.D. at London.
He is well known for his book and cassette Accents of English, the book and CD The Sounds of the IPA, Lingvistikaj Aspektoj de Esperanto, and the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. He is the author of the most widely used English-Esperanto dictionary.
Until his retirement, Wells directed UCL's two-week phonetics summer course, focusing on practical and theoretical phonetics as well as aspects of teaching phonetics. The course ends with written and oral examinations, for which the IPA Certificate of Proficiency in the Phonetics of English is awarded.
A considerable part of Wells's research focuses on the phonetic description of varieties of English. From 2003 to 2007 he was president of the International Phonetic Association. He is also a member of the six-person Academic Advisory Committee at Linguaphone.
Wells has long been a pioneer of new technology. He is the inventor of the X-SAMPA ASCII phonetic alphabet for use in computers that could not handle IPA symbols. He learnt HTML in the mid-1990s and created a webpage that compiled media references to Estuary English, a concept that he has always been sceptical of. Although now retired, Wells still runs a phonetic blog that attracts comments from regular readers.
Read more about this topic: John C. Wells
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