English dialectologist, University of Leeds.
Principal researcher (field-worker) for the _Survey of English Dialects_
(Orton & Dieth, eds, 4 vols. 1962-71).
"He spent over a decade (1950s)...travelling all over the country,
interviewing mainly elderly agricultural people, tape-recording their
accents, grammar and vocabulary, and making copious notes about their
cultural knowledge and practices..." At first using a motorbike and
sidecar (so a technological advance on Edmond Edmont, who did it by
bicycle). Later the survey got him a Land Rover, which towed a caravan
in which he and his wife lived.
Also did popular BBC broadcasts about English dialects and traditional
rural life.
He was one of the dialect experts who pinpointed the origin of the hoax Yorkshire Ripper (see 2 January).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Ellis_(linguist)
BUT ALSO (Crystal mentions) 18 January is...
Island Languages Day in the Ryukyu Islands
"Island Languages" (shima kutuba) refers to the several languages of
this group, related to Japanese (in the Japonic family) but not mutually intelligible with it. They are all endangered by the encroachment of
standard Japanese.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyuan_languages
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