Daniel Jones

Daniel Jones was a British phonetician who led the development of phonetics as an academic discipline in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century, holding a professorship at University College London. Jones developed the system of Cardinal Vowels, a set of reference vowel qualities defined by precise articulatory positions, which gave phoneticians a standardized framework for describing and comparing vowel sounds across different languages and accents. Jones is closely associated with codifying the concept of Received Pronunciation as a description of a prestige, relatively regionally neutral accent of British English, most influentially through his English Pronouncing Dictionary, first published in 1917, which used the International Phonetic Alphabet to record pronunciations and went through many later editions. Jones also authored An Outline of English Phonetics, a widely used textbook, and helped establish the department of phonetics at University College London as a leading international center for the study of speech sounds.