William Labov, RIP.

The great linguist William Labov, who practically invented sociolinguistics, has died at 97; Ximena Conde’s Philadelphia Inquirer obit (archived) is excellent:

Dr. Labov approached language as something that by its nature was variable, not governed by an ideal set of rules of grammar. His work changed whose dialects linguists saw worthy of study and dove into the socioeconomic politics of language. The way he saw it, dialects touched everything, from how you’re viewed to how you learn. “He really believed that every single person on the planet is worth talking to and has something to learn from,” said Gillian Sankoff, his wife and fellow sociolinguist at the University of Pennsylvania. The pair married in 1993.

Dr. Labov was born in Passaic, N.J., on Dec. 4, 1927, and raised in Rutherford, N.J. He majored in English and philosophy at Harvard University but also dabbled in chemistry, which he would use working as an industrial chemist before returning to school to study linguistics. He studied and worked at Columbia University before landing in 1971 at the University of Pennsylvania, where he would conduct some of his most lasting work.

Dr. Labov’s influence and innovations in linguistics can be broken into two categories: the technical and conceptual. On the technical side, Dr. Labov relied less on intuition than his predecessors, taking a clinical and statistical approach by recording his subjects and analyzing them on a computer before the technology became ubiquitous. He also transformed how linguists viewed language changes, researching these shifts in real time — like when he found the “Southern-inflected sound” of Philadelphia was slowly turning into a more “Northern” accent.

Bigger still was the choice to study speech patterns and changes in communities that would have been ignored. Dr. Labov took an interest in how Puerto Ricans in New York City talked and what he distinguished as African American English. Dr. Labov believed “everyday vernacular” was worthy of organizing and he didn’t dismiss dialects that might appear to carry errors because they don’t follow mainstream rules, former student and linguist Josef Fruehwald said. “People aren’t chaotic as they’re speaking,” said Fruehwald. “There’s structure to the pattern of variation they’re using.” […]

“Linguists are smart,” was Dr. Labov’s mantra when it came to more esoteric topics, said Fruehwald and others. Dr. Labov didn’t try to poke holes in papers he thought were “wrong”; instead he looked for something worthwhile to take away from them. Sneller, one of Dr. Labov’s last sociolinguistic students at Penn, said he often kicked off reading group discussions with a “what have we learned?” This approach was just one part of Dr. Labov’s never-ending quest for knowledge. Linguists who knew him said he was not one to be stuck in his ways methodologically or technologically, a trap some academics can fall into.

I love that line about not trying to poke holes in papers but looking for something worthwhile to take away from them; that’s how I try to approach what I read. Labov’s name, surprisingly, is pronounced [ləbˈoʊv] (lə-BOVE — see this LH post); there are more links at Mark Liberman’s Log post, as well as an account of the “Bunny Paper” which I urge you to read. He was quite a guy.

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    The Bunny paper is indeed worth reading. Though also somewhat horrifying. Good to see that fellow Arthur Jensen unsqueamishly pegged for what he actually was.

  2. David Eddyshaw says

    Zupibig la zuanama, nɛ ya Bʋriasʋŋ!

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