Lilias Armstrong (1882–1937) was an English phonetician. Her book on English intonation, written with Ida C. Ward, was in print for fifty years. She also provided some of the first detailed descriptions of tone in Somali and Kikuyu. Armstrong grew up in Northern England. She graduated from the University of Leeds, where she studied French and Latin. She taught French in an elementary school in the London suburbs before joining the University College Phonetics Department, headed by Daniel Jones, where she was eventually appointed as a reader. Her works include the 1926 book A Handbook of English Intonation (co-written with Ward), the 1934 paper "The Phonetic Structure of Somali", and the book The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Kikuyu, published posthumously in 1940. She was the subeditor of the International Phonetic Association's journal Le Maître Phonétique for more than a decade, and was praised in her day for her teaching. Jones wrote in his obituary of her that she was "one of the finest phoneticians in the world". (Full article...)