Daniel Jones (12 September 1881 – 4 December 1967) was a British phonetician who studied under Paul Passy, professor of phonetics at the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne (University of Paris).

In 1900, Jones studied briefly at William Tilly's Marburg Language Institute in Germany, where he was first introduced to phonetics.

He became the first linguist in the western world to use the term phoneme in its current sense, employing the word in his article "The phonetic structure of the Sechuana Language".

In the original form of the cardinal vowels, Jones employed a dual-parameter system of description based on the supposed height of the tongue arch together with the shape of the lips.

He was the first phonetician to produce, in his "Sechuana Reader", a competent description of an African tone language, including the concept of downstep.

Apart from his own vast array of published work, Jones acted as mentor to numerous scholars who later went on to become famous linguists in their own right.

These included such names as Lilias Armstrong, Harold Palmer, Ida C. Ward, Hélène Coustenoble, Arthur Lloyd James, Dennis Fry, A. C. Gimson, Gordon Arnold, J.D.

For several decades, his department at University College was pivotal in the development of phonetics and in making its findings known to the wider world.

Beverley Collins and Inger M. Mees (1998) speculate that it is Jones, not as is often thought Sweet, who provided George Bernard Shaw with the basis for his fictional character Professor Henry Higgins in Pygmalion.