Born in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, he attended Grange Grammar School and obtained a scholarship to study at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
After national service, part of which was spent in India, he read English at Leeds University, with a master's thesis on the Lincolnshire dialect.
Ellis performed much of the field work this entailed, and many of his recordings and interviews are housed in the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture.
[2] He was the first person to provide expert evidence for speaker identification in an English court,[3][4] and in June 1979, he correctly identified that a tape released by police that purported to be from the Yorkshire Ripper was by a hoaxer (nicknamed Wearside Jack by the press), as the accent was that of someone from an area a significant distance from the crime scene.
[6] After taking early retirement from his university post, Ellis continued to provide linguistic expertise as an expert witness in court cases.