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 Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, he attended Grange Grammar School and obtained a scholarship to study at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His studies were interrupted by World War II, during which he was a navigator in the RAF. After national service, part of which was spent in India, he read English at Leeds University, with a master's thesis on the Lincolnshire dialect. 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. He went on to be a lecturer and senior lecturer in the School of English at Leeds. He was the first person to provide expert evidence for speaker identification in an English court, and in June 1979, he correctly identified that a tape released by police that purported to be from the Yorkshire Ripper was by a hoaxer (nicknamed Wearside Jack by the press),