John David Michael Henry Laver, CBE, FBA, FRSE (20 January 1938 – 6 May 2020) was a British phonetician.
He was raised in India for six years and spoke Hindustani and English and later lived in Egypt, Libya, Kenya and Cyprus until the age of ten.
[3] After attending a boarding school in Hampshire, Laver entered the Royal Air Force College Cranwell to pursue a career as a military pilot, which he eventually gave up.
[3] In 1966, he was appointed a lecturer at Edinburgh,[2] where he received a PhD in 1975, presenting the thesis "Individual features in voice quality" [4] supervised by Abercrombie.
[8] With Ronald E. Asher, Laver served as general editor of The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Speech and Language for Wiley-Blackwell, which involved nearly 40 contributors and was completed in 2013 after about 25 years of preparation.