Ida C. Ward

Ida Caroline Ward (born October 4, 1880 in Bradford in northern England , † October 10, 1949 in Guildford , England ) was a British linguist who mainly studied African languages.

After 16 years as a teacher at various secondary schools she came in 1919 to the Department of Phonetics of University College London . As a child of the north of England, she had developed an innate sense of phonetic differences in the English and European languages. She wrote several academic books on topics from the English language before she turned almost exclusively to the West African languages, for example the Efik (1933), the Igbo (1936 and 1941), the Mende (1944) and the Yoruba (published posthumously in 1952 ).

Works (selection)

• 1926: together with Lilias E. Armstrong : Handbook of English Intonation , BG Teubner Verlag , Leipzig 1926
• 1933: The phonetic and tonal structure of Efik , Cambridge, W. Heffer & Sons
• 1936: An introduction to the Ibo language , Cambridge, W. Heffer & Sons
• 1937: Practical suggestions for the learning of an African language , Africa, supplement Vol. 10, No 2, London
• 1941: Ibo dialects and the development of a common language , Cambridge, W. Heffer & Sons
• 1944: A phonetic introduction to Mende , in KH Crosby: An introduction to the study of Mende, Cambridge, W. Heffer & Sons
• 1952: An introduction to the Yoruba language , Cambridge, W. Heffer & Sons
• 1933: together with Diedrich Hermann Westermann : Practical Phonetics for Students of African Languages , for the International African Institute , London, Oxford University Press

obituary

• 1950: Diedrich Hermann Westermann and Daryll Forde : Ida Caroline Ward , Africa, 20, pp. 1-5