William Labov

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.

Labov is a professor emeritus in the linguistics department of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and pursues research in sociolinguistics, language change, and dialectology.

He graduated from Harvard in 1948.

After graduating from Harvard, Labov worked as an industrial chemist in his family's business (1949–61) before turning to linguistics.

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 should not be stigmatized as substandard, but rather respected as a variety of English with its own grammatical rules.

He has also pursued research in referential indeterminacy and is noted for his studies of the way ordinary people structure narrative stories of their own lives.

Several of his classes are service-based, with students going to West Philadelphia to help tutor young children while simultaneously learning linguistics from different dialects such as AAVE.

More recently, Labov has studied ongoing changes in the phonology of English as spoken in the United States, as well as the origins and patterns of chain shifts of vowels (one sound replacing a second, replacing a third, in a complete chain).

For his MA thesis (1963) he completed a study of change in the dialect of Martha's Vineyard, which he presented before the Linguistic Society of America.

Labov took his PhD (1964) at Columbia University, studying under Uriel Weinreich.

He was an assistant professor of linguistics at Columbia (1964–70) before becoming an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971, then a full professor, and in 1976 becoming director of the university's Linguistics Laboratory.

The methods Labov 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.

Labov's works include The Study of Nonstandard English (1969), 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, vol.III Cognitive and Cultural factors, 2010), and, with Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg, The Atlas of North American English (2006).

In the Atlas of North American English (2006), he and his co-authors find three major divergent chain shifts taking place today: a Southern Shift (in Appalachia and southern coastal regions); a Northern Cities Vowel Shift affecting a region from Madison, Wisconsin, east to Utica, New York; and a Canadian Shift affecting most of Canada, in addition to several minor chain shifts in smaller regions.

Among Labov's well-known students are Charles Boberg, Anne H. Charity Hudley, Penelope Eckert, Gregory Guy, Robert A. Leonard, Geoffrey Nunberg, Shana Poplack, and John R. Rickford.

His methods were adopted in England by Peter Trudgill for Norwich speech and K. M. Petyt for West Yorkshire speech.

Labov was awarded the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science by the Franklin Institute with the citation for "establishing the cognitive basis of language variation and change through rigorous analysis of linguistic data, and for the study of non-standard dialects with significant social and cultural implications."

In "Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience", Labov and Joshua Waletzky take a sociolinguistic approach to examine how language works between people.

This is significant because it contextualizes the study of structure and form, connecting purpose to method.

His stated purpose is to "isolate the elements of narrative".

This work focuses exclusively on oral narratives.

Labov describes narrative as having two functions: referential and evaluative, with its referential functions orienting and grounding a story in its contextual world by referencing events in sequential order as they originally occurred, and its evaluative functions describing the storyteller's purpose in telling the story.

Formally analyzing data from orally generated texts obtained via observed group interaction and interview (600 interviews were taken from several studies whose participants included ethnically diverse groups of children and adults from various backgrounds ), Labov divides narrative into five or six sections:

While not every narrative includes all these elements, the purpose of this subdivision is to show that narratives have inherent structural order.

Labov argues that narrative units must retell events in the order they were experienced because narrative is temporally sequenced.

In other words, events do not occur at random but are connected to one another; thus "the original semantic interpretation" depends on their original order.

To demonstrate this sequence, he breaks a story down into its basic parts.

He defines narrative clause as the "basic unit of narrative" around which everything else is built.

Clauses can be distinguished from one another by temporal junctures, which indicate a shift in time and separate narrative clauses.

Temporal junctures mark temporal sequencing because clauses cannot be rearranged without disrupting their meaning.

Labov and Waletzky's findings are important because they derived them from actual data rather than abstract theorization.

Labov, Waletzky, &c., set up interviews and documented speech patterns in storytelling, keeping with the ethnographic tradition of tape-recording oral text so it can be referenced exactly.

This inductive method creates a new system through which to understand story text.

One of Labov's most quoted contributions to theories of language change is his Golden Age Principle (or Golden Age Theory).

It claims that any changes in the sounds or the grammar that have come to conscious awareness in a speech community trigger a uniformly negative reaction.

"Communities differ in the extent to which they stigmatize the newer forms of language, but I have never yet met anyone who greeted them with applause. Some older citizens welcome the new music and dances, the new electronic devices and computers. But no one has ever been heard to say, 'It's wonderful the way young people talk today. It's so much better than the way we talked when I was a kid.' ... The most general and most deeply held belief about language is the Golden Age Principle: At some time in the past, language was in a state of perfection. It is understood that in such a state, every sound was correct and beautiful, and every word and expression was proper, accurate, and appropriate. Furthermore, the decline from that state has been regular and persistent, so that every change represents a falling away from the golden age, rather than a return to it. Every new sound will be heard as ugly, and every new expression will be heard as improper, inaccurate, and inappropriate.

He retired in 2015 but continues to publish research.

Labov was born and raised in Rutherford, New Jersey, moving to Fort Lee at age 12.

He attended Harvard University, where he majored in English and philosophy and studied chemistry.