He then worked in the phonetics department of University College London before moving to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he became Professor of General Linguistics, a position he held until his retirement in 1956.
[3] In July 1941, before the outbreak of war with Japan, Firth attended a conference on the training of Japanese interpreters and translators and began to think of how crash courses might be devised.
By the summer of 1942 he had devised a method of training people rapidly in how to eavesdrop on Japanese conversations (for example, between pilots and ground control) and to interpret what they heard.
The trainees were mostly posted to India and played a vital role during the long Burma Campaign giving warning of bombing raids, and a few of them were undertaking similar duties on ships of the Royal Navy during the last year of the war.
T. F. Mitchell worked on Arabic and Berber, Frank R. Palmer on Ethiopian languages, including Tigre, and Michael Halliday on Chinese.
Among his influential students were Masud Husain Khan and the Arab linguists Ibrahim Anis, Tammam Hassan and Kamal Bashir.