Remembering John Kelly (1936-2023)

Posted on 17 May 2024

The Department of Language and Linguistic Science is saddened to hear about the passing of John Kelly last December.

The Department of Language and Linguistic Science is saddened to hear about the passing of John Kelly last December. John Kelly was a dear colleague and great phonetician and phonologist who left his mark on our department and held a prominent role in the dissemination of the Firthian Prosodic Analysis tradition.

Prof. Emeritus John Local has kindly shared with us the following obituary:

John Kelly phonetician, phonologist and Africanist died in Leeds on 30 December 2023 at the age of 87. He was born in Davyhulme, a small town on the outskirts of Manchester on 23 August 1936.

John read French and German as an undergraduate at the University of Manchester and in 1961 began postgraduate study at Edinburgh in the Department of Phonetics under David Abercrombie. He was an assistant lecturer in phonetics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, from 1961 to 1964, and a lecturer in phonetics at the University of lbadan, Nigeria,

from 1964 to 1965. He then became a lecturer in phonetics and linguistics at SOAS moving to the Department of Language, as it then was, at York in 1972 to teach Swahili and Phonetics. He retired as Reader in Phonetics and Linguistics in 1998.

John published on a variety of African languages including Swahili, Fang, Xhosa and Urhobo as well as North Welsh, and English dialects. He was an astonishingly acute auditory and impressionistic phonetician as anyone who observed him working with language consultants will testify. He was also an innovative and creative phonologist working in the framework of

Firthian Prosodic Analysis. He was the driving force behind the series of York Colloquia in Prosodic Analysis and the inspired creation of the Firthian Prosodic Archive at York.

A gentle, wise and caring man. His is greatly missed.

This obituary is also available at the International Phonetic Association website.