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John C. Wells


John Christopher Wells (born 11 March 1939 in Bootle, Lancashire) is a British phonetician and Esperanto teacher. Wells is a professor emeritus at University College London, where until his retirement in 2006 he held the departmental chair in phonetics.

Wells earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Cambridge and his master's degree and his PhD at the University of London.

Wells is 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. Accents of English was reviewed by the sociolinguist KM Petyt in the December 1982 edition of the Journal of the IPA. His review was generally positive, but he criticised the geographical unevenness of the coverage and the large number of anecdotes from personal experience.

Before writing Accents of English, Wells had written a very critical review of the Linguistic Atlas of England, which was the principal output of the Survey of English Dialects. He argued that the methodology was outdated, that the sample was not representative of the population and that it was not possible to "discover with any certainty the synchronic vowel-system in each of the localities investigated".

Until his retirement, Wells directed a two-week summer course in phonetics for University College London, 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.


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