Jones Papers

The collection is divided into: personal history; the Department of Phonetics at University College London; lecture notes; published and broadcast work; unpublished research work; correspondence; acquired printed material.

Open. The papers are available subject to the usual conditions of access to Archives and Manuscripts material, after the completion of a Reader's Undertaking.

Jones was born in central London, the son of Daniel Jones, a barrister, and his second wife, Viola. Although Jones himself passed the bar exams, he never practised law as he had already developed an interest in the then relatively new science of phonetics. Jones's association with University College London began in 1907 when he became a part-time lecturer in phonetics. In 1912 phonetics attained departmental status and expanded both in staffing and scope. In 1913 an experimental research laboratory was set up, in 1914 Jones was made Reader in Phonetics and in 1921 he became the first Professor of Phonetics in a British university. During his years at University College London and after his retirement in 1949, Jones published several works. His major publications were 'The pronunciation of English' (Cambridge University Press, 1909), 'An English Pronouncing Dictionary' (Dent, 1917), 'An Outline of English Phonetics' (Teubner, 1918), 'The Phoneme, its nature and use' (Heffer, 1950) and a number of phonetic readers of various languages. Jones was involved with the International Phonetics Association becoming President in 1950. He was also active in the Simplified Spelling Society, the BBC, and the Advisory Committee on Spoken English.