William David Labov ( ; December4, 1927December17, 2024) was an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics.E.g., in the opening chapter of The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (ed. Chambers et al., Blackwell 2002), J.K. Chambers writes that "variationist sociolinguistics had its effective beginnings only in 1963, the year in which William Labov presented the first sociolinguistic research report"; the dedication page of the Handbook says that Labov's "ideas imbue every page". He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics, and "one of the most influential linguists of the 20th and 21st centuries".
Labov was a professor in the linguistics department of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and pursued research in sociolinguistics, language change, and dialectology. He retired in 2015 but continued to publish research until his death in 2024.
Early life and education Labov was born in Passaic, New Jersey, to Benjamin Labov, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, and Rhea (). According to Labov, the physician who delivered him was William Carlos Williams. He was raised in Rutherford, moving to Fort Lee at age 12. He attended Harvard University, where he majored in English and philosophy and studied chemistry. He graduated from Harvard in 1948.
Career After graduating from Harvard, Labov worked as an industrial chemist in his family's business (1949–1961) 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 earned 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.
Linguistic research 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 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 were service-based, with students going to West Philadelphia to help tutor young children while simultaneously learning linguistics from different dialects such as AAVE.
Later, Labov studied ongoing changes in the phonology of English as spoken in the U.S., as well as the origins and patterns of chain shifts of vowels (one sound replacing a second, replacing a third, in a complete chain). 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 around 1972 by Peter Trudgill for Norwich speech and K. M. Petyt for West Yorkshire speech. On a sabbatical in England shortly after, J. K. Chambers, reading Trudgill's tattered copy of Sociolinguistic Patterns, left formal linguistics to become a sociolinguist.Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 2005, festschrift for J. K. Chambers.
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).
The Franklin Institute awarded Labov the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, citing him 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".
Language in use 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 occurredLabov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 32. and its evaluative functions describing the storyteller's purpose in telling the story.Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 41. 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 backgroundsLabov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 13.), Labov divides narrative into five or six sections:
Abstract – gives an overview of the story. Orientation – Labov describes this as "referential [free clauses that] serve to orient the listener in respect to person, place, time, and behavioral situation". He specifies that these are contextual clues that precede the main story. Complicating action – the main story, during which the narrative unfolds. A story may consist of multiple complication sections. Evaluation – author evinces self-awareness, giving explicit or implicit purpose to the retelling of the story. Thus evaluation gives some indication of the significance the author attributes to their story. But evaluation can be done subtly: for instance, "lexical intensifiers [are a type of] semantically defined evaluation".Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 37. Resolution – occurs sequentially following the evaluation. The resolution may give the story a sense of completion. Coda – returns listener to the present, drawing them back out of the world of the story into the world of the storytelling event. A coda is not essential to a narrative, and some narratives do not have one.
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; "the original semantic interpretation" depends on their original order.Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 21. To demonstrate this sequence, he breaks a story down into its basic parts. He defines narrative clause as the "basic unit of narrative"Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 22. around which everything else is built. Clauses can be distinguished from one another by temporal junctures,Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 25. 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, etc., 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.
Linguistic principles One of Labov's 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.
Scholarly influence and criticism