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.
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.
Zupibig la zuanama, nɛ ya Bʋriasʋŋ!
Nollaig Chridheil agus Bliadhna Mhath Ùr!
I was quite grumpy as day after day passed after Labov’s death without any attention being paid by the so-called general interest press, as if it were a cruel reminder about how little the wider world shares our interests or takes them seriously. But the Inquirer piece (dated a full six days after the death) is quite well-done, even if there’s a bit of a local-interest “area man” angle to it. And maybe it was in turn the necessary catalyst for the N.Y. Times to get around to running its own obit a day or two later.
Non-paywalled version of the NYT piece as picked up via wire service by the Texarkana Gazette. So at least the denizens of Texarkana are being well-informed.
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/texarkana-gazette/20241225/281599541113757
Just noticed that WP says that Labov was delivered into this world by William Carlos Williams.
For a moment I thought you meant William Williams (artist). I wish there was an unbroken line between the two.
There’s also William Williams, author of the much better (yes, really) Welsh original of the hymn Guide me, O thou great Jehovah.
Obviously a talented family.
I have no seen “based” used outside far-right or far-right-mocking usage. I’m sure Steve’s grand-critters don’t know its provenance.
@David Eddyshaw
The thing I found most striking about the Bunny paper (‘Finding out about children’s language’) was the very idea that anyone would think that a neurologically normal kindegartener might have no language.
“Professor Donald Topping just returned from Guam where the decision has been taken to teach both Chamorro and English in a bilingual program. He tells me that the teachers had already decided that many of the
school children didn’t have any language at all: they didn’t know English and they didn’t know Chamorro.”
Had they never sat on a bus and eavesdropped on a small child talking to their mother?
Indeed. It’s a triumph of linguistic ideology over basic common sense.
(Political ideology was very evidently also involved. The attitudes in question are still very much with us, too.)
Come to that, Chomsky’s celebrated poverty-of-the-stimulus argument for his linguistic nativism was based on no actual research whatsoever into what kind of language (and how much of it) small children are actually exposed to. Who needs data when you have infallible intuition?
Labov’s daughter was a big believer in just making stuff up as an approach to sociology.
@Brett “Labov’s daughter….”
Which of them? Can you give examples of her “just making stuff up”?
@M: Alice Goffman
Stepdaughter, in fact. I can’t access the article, but WP is quite forthcoming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Goffman
He adopted her.
@David Eddyshaw & M – I don’t know enough about this to have an opinion about whether the Chronicle piece is credible or not, but you can (probably) read the whole thing here https://archive.is/LilmG
“He tells me that the teachers had already decided that many of the school children didn’t have any language at all: they didn’t know English and they didn’t know Chamorro.”
IIRC it is said to be true (not sure if there’s been studies) that bilingually-raised children start speaking later, due to (presumably) more confusion in their input; in which case that this would have actually explained the described observation if the kids in question were, say, 3. I imagine that any “school children” would have been rather older than 3, though.
David E.: 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.
It is. On all accounts. But I think it’s unfair to call it a paper. It’s a lecture.
I honored Prof. Labov’s memory yesterday by doing some fieldwork on the current state of rhoticity among New York City speakers. Gathering data from, specifically, a single NYC speaker who like me was having a late lunch while seated at the bar of a midtown Manhattan establishment. After he’d finished his food he ordered another drink and started conducting his business affairs via cellphone from the barstool. He had a lengthy conversation about some particular business problem needing resolution whose details required him to say with some frequency both a) “warehouse”; and b) “fire code” and/or “fire marshal.” I was struck by how his “warehouse” was aggressively non-rhotic, while his “fire” was just as strongly rhotic. There was some further confirmation of a pattern based on preceding vowel with a non-rhotic “Times Square” but a rhotic “wired.” Also a non-rhotic “percent,” which is a different vowel and different stress pattern.
The most otherwise notable feature of his speech was a very strongly regional CLOTH/THOUGHT vowel akin to the one Mike Myers has his Linda Richman character do in the context of her “Cawfee Tawk” show — what wikipedia calls a “a high, gliding /ɔ/ vowel.”
This is what Wikipedia calls “variably rhotic accents” (search in Rhoticity in English). I once noticed the same thing in a youtube recording of … Calvin Coolidge.
Here. It’s from 1924, the earliest talking film of an American president.
Teddy Roosevelt is also “variably” rhotic. He had to speak loud and clear, for the non-amplifying recording devices.
It seems like “variably rhotic” is commonly (but not exclusively?) used to describe the idiolects of speakers who may sometimes pronounce a given word rhotically but other times pronounce the very same word non-rhotically, depending on contextual sociolinguistic factors that affect choice of register and/or code-switching. Maybe the same label is also used for what I’m trying to describe – i.e. the idiolect of a speaker who is fairly stably rhotic in some phonological contexts but not others – such as in this case non-rhotic for the SQUARE lexical set but rhotic in words where the historical “r” immediately follows the PRICE vowel. It seems like it would be helpful, though, to have a different label (“semi-rhotic”? I dunno) for that separate phenomenon, where the “variable” is the vowel of the specific syllable rather than sociolinguistic context of the specific discourse.