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Concept
William Labov
Summary
William Labov (ləˈboʊv ; 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 retired in 2015 but continues to publish research.
Labov was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. He attended Harvard University, where he majored in English and philosophy and studied chemistry. 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. 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. 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.
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