Labov, William (1927– )D. Sankoff

William Labov has been the dominant figure insociolinguistics since its emergence in the mid-1960s.Having studied with Weinreich (seeWeinreich, Uriel)at Columbia, he also taught there until 1970 beforefounding the sociolinguistics program at the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania, which has become the Meccafor the discipline.Through Weinreich, Labov was exposed to the

most progressive view of language extant in classicallinguistics, its variability and changeability acrossspace, time, speakers, domains and contexts. WithWeinreich, Labov laid down a program for theempirical study of language in the speech communityin 1968, thus making the bridge between thetraditional study of language and the new field ofsociolinguistics.His 1963 MA project on a sound change in

progress in Martha’s Vineyard and his 1964 PhDthesis on sociolinguistic stratification of New YorkCity introduced techniques of sample surveys,natural experimentation, and quantitative analysisinto sociolinguistic research. However, it was in hisindependent study of African American vernacularEnglish in Harlem starting in 1965 that he made theparadigmatic breakthroughs underlying the modernfield of linguistic variation theory. Labov’s intent wasan empirical, rigorous, and reproducible approach tolanguage as it is actually used, a scientific linguistics.His ambivalence about the label ‘sociolinguistics,’ inanalogy to other hyphenated domains like psycho-linguistics, educational linguistics, etc., reflects hisoverarching project of advancing linguistic theory bygrounding it in solid data and objective analysesrather than unverifiable intuitions and polemicdebate, without sacrificing the creative roles ofscientific insight and intricate inductive and deductivereasoning. Key components of this approach includethe following:

(a) The resolution of Saussure’s paradox throughthe notion of the linguistic variable. This is anexplicit way of measurably linking the impor-tant structures of linguistic theory with timeand other extralinguistic factors, through thequantitative effects of these factors on thechoice among two or more different articula-tions of a given phonological form in a givencontext, involving no change in the denota-tional value of a lexical item, or the syntacticfunction of an affix.

(b) Principled sampling procedures, together withsufficient demographic, social, and linguisticcharacterization of the speaker within thespeech community.

(c) Fieldwork methods designed to circumventobserver effects when eliciting and recordingspontaneous speech samples of varying registerin natural context, as well as quality controltechnology for speech data collected in fieldconditions.

(d) Scientific respect for the speech corpus, includ-ing data preservation and the principle ofaccountability, whereby all tokens in thecorpus of the structure under study must beincluded in the analysis and calculations.

(e) Multivariate quantitative models of perfor-mance for attributing usage tendencies tolinguistic and extralinguistic factors (see Sta-tistics in Sociolinguistics). This work made itpossible to investigate questions of centralinterest to linguistic theory using statistics,based on the linguistic variable.

(f) Research-based advocacy for minority speechcommunities. He was the first to study and‘revalorise’ minority and vernacular speechforms. He fought against Bernsteinian viewsof working class language, against the deficithypothesis and against elitist language atti-tudes in the educational establishment (seeCode, Sociolinguistic; Bernstein, Basil). Thislinguistic activism is clear in his choice ofcommunities to study, in his recruitment ofstudents, in his writings, in his advocacy in thecourts, and in the media.

This program, carried out by Labov, his students anddisciples worldwide, has met with undeniable success.The principles of sound change he established andthe universal and language-specific constraint hier-archies he discovered have had a great impact onphonology and other areas of linguistics. His studiesof t/d deletion, auxiliary contraction, and others havebeen replicated many times and have served asmodels for entire research traditions in New WorldSpanish, Canadian French, Brazilian Portuguese,and other languages. However, despite its unwaver-ing focus on the linguistics of spoken language, orperhaps because of it, the intellectual power of thisapproach, studying usage instead of intuition, andconcentrating on the elucidation of linguistic struc-ture in social and historical context rather than usingpredefined language features as tools for properlysocial science investigations, it has also revolutio-nized many other disciplines within language science.His Harlem work, followed up by a generation

of students in the US and the Caribbean, rescuedthe field of creole studies from its ethnolinguisticbackwater to become one of the most intellectually

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rigorous and socially relevant ongoing researchareas.His long-standing interest in the vowel system of

American English, particularly the Northern CitiesShift (see Chain Shifts) and the relationships amongEnglish dialects worldwide, has profoundly changeddialectology. Based on his experience in urban speechcommunities, he was able to dramatically increase thesocial validity of survey studies, while introducingnew techniques and technology to increase efficien-cies and to multiply the kinds of discovery possible.This work culminated in the monumental Atlas ofNorth American English (see The Atlas of NorthAmerican English), whose computer-based methodshave transformed dialectology.Labov made many contributions to the analysis of

narratives (see Bamberg 1997; Narrative, Natural).While his deep insights into the transformation ofeveryday experience into narrative would be hard torival, the example he set, and the protocols heestablished for the analysis of narrative discoursehave inspired a proliferation of research in this area.In the study of social change, Labov’s gender andclass-based models of language variation changeremain fundamental for the understanding of theprestige and influence of sociodemographic groups,culturally-specific gender roles, and the modeling andquantitative dynamics of trait diffusion within thecommunity.Labov’s role in the field is attested to by his

presence as invited speaker at the large majority ofthe 30 annual NWAVE (New Ways of AnalyzingVariation) conferences, the premier sociolinguisticsmeeting, since 1972. He founded and is the guidingspirit behind the major variation theory journal,Language Variation and Change (1988–). He waspresident of the Linguistics Society of America in1979. In 1993 he became one of the very few linguistsever elected to the National Academy of Sciences ofthe USA. He has been awarded honorary doctoratesby numerous universities worldwide. His field methodsand quantitative analysis protocols are taught insociolinguistics classes everywhere. PhD students

who have studied with him include many of the topresearchers in sociolinguistics and related areastoday: S. Ash, J. Auger, J. Baugh (see Baugh, John),C. Boberg, A. Bower, S. Boyd, M. Braga, P. Cohen,B. Dayton, P. Eckert, G. Guy, N. Haeri, J. Hibaya,D. Hindle, M. Lennig, B. Lavandera, C. Linde, J.Myhill, N. Nagy, G. Nunberg, N. O’Connor, M.Oliveira, C. Paradis, P. Patrick, S. Poplack (seePoplack, Shana), J. Rickford (see Rickford, John), J.Roberts, D. Schiffrin (see Schiffrin, Deborah), F.Tarallo, B. Wald, J. Weiner, M. Yaeger-Dror andmany others, while scores of post-doctoral studentsand scholars on sabbatical have also worked withhim.

See also: Sociolinguistic Variation; Dialect andDialectology; Sociophonetics; Chain Shifts; Ebonicsand African American Vernacular English; Narra-tive, Natural; Code, Sociolinguistic; The Atlas ofNorth American English; Forensic Sociolinguistics;Sound Change; Sociolinguistics and LanguageChange; Vernacular.

Bibliography

Bamberg M (ed.) 1997 Oral Versions of Personal Experi-ence: 3 Decades of Narrative Analysis. Journal ofNarrative and Life History 7, Special issue (Nos. 1–4)

Guy G R, Feagin C, Schiffrin D, Baugh J (eds.) 1996Towards a Social Science of Language: Essays in Honor ofWilliam Labov (2 vols.). Benjamins, Philadelphia, PA

Labov W 1966 The Social Stratification of English in NewYork City. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington,DC

Labov W 1972a Sociolinguistic Patterns. University ofPennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA

Labov W 1972b Language in the Inner City. University ofPennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA

Labov W 1994 Principles of Linguistic Change Vol 1:Internal Factors. Vol. 2: Social Factors. Blackwell, Oxford

Labov W, Ash S, Boberg S (forthcoming) Atlas of NorthAmerican English. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin

Weinrich U, Labov W, Herzog M 1968 Empirical founda-tions for a theory of language change. In: Lehmann W P,Malkiel Y (eds.) Directions for Historical Linguistics.University of Texas Press, Austin, TX

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Profiles of Sociolinguists