Everything about William Labov totally explained
William Labov (; born
December 4,
1927) is an
American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist
sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics. He is employed as a professor in the
linguistics department of the
University of Pennsylvania, and pursues research in sociolinguistics, language change, and
dialectology.
Born in
Rutherford,
New Jersey, he studied at
Harvard (
1948) and worked as an industrial chemist (
1949-
61) before turning to linguistics. For his MA thesis (
1963) he completed a study of change in the dialect of
Martha's Vineyard, which was presented before the
Linguistic Society of America to great acclaim. Labov took his PhD (
1964) at
Columbia University studying under
Uriel Weinreich. He taught at Columbia (
1964-
70) before becoming a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania (
1971), and then became director of the university's Linguistics Laboratory (
1977). The methods he used to collect data for his study of the varieties of
English spoken in
New York City, published as
The Social Stratification of English in New York City (
1966), have been influential in social dialectology. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, his studies of the linguistic features of
African American Vernacular English (AAVE) were also influential: he argued that AAVE shouldn't be stigmatized as substandard but respected as a variety of English with its own grammatical rules. He has also pursued research in
referential indeterminacy, and he's noted for his seminal studies of the way ordinary people structure narrative stories of their own lives.
More recently he's studied changes in the phonology of English as spoken in the United States today, and studied the origins and patterns of
chain shifts of vowels (one sound replacing a second, replacing a third, in a complete chain). He finds two major divergent chain shifts taking place today: a
Southern Shift (in
Appalachia and southern coastal regions) and a
Northern Cities Shift affecting a region from
Madison, Wisconsin east to
Utica, New York, as well as several minor chain shifts in smaller regions.
Labov's works include
Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English Vernacular (
1972),
Sociolinguistic Patterns (1972),
Principles of Linguistic Change (vol.I Internal Factors,
1994; vol.II Social Factors,
2001), and, together with Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg,
The Atlas of North American English (
2006).
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