J C Wells
John Christopher Wells (born 1939) is a British phonetician and Esperanto teacher. Until his retirement in 2006 he was professor of phonetics at University College London.
After a childhood in poverty, he studied languages and taught himself Gregg Shorthand. Having learned Welsh, he was interviewed in Welsh on radio; he has a reasonable knowledge of ten different languages. He was apparently approached by the Home Office to work on speaker identification, but turned down the offer as it was still considered unacceptable to be gsy at the time, and he feared that the security check would make his homosexuality public.[1]
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.
