William Labov facts for kids

William Labov (lə-BOHV; December 4, 1927 – December 17, 2024) was an American linguist. A linguist is someone who studies language. He is known as the person who started a field called variationist sociolinguistics. This is a way of studying how language changes and why different groups of people speak in different ways.

Many people say he was a very original and important person in linguistics. He created many of the ways that sociolinguists study language. He was one of the most important linguists of the 1900s and 2000s.

Labov was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He studied how language changes, different ways of speaking (dialects), and how society affects language. He stopped working in 2015 but kept publishing his research until he passed away in 2024.

Early Life and Education

William Labov was born in Passaic, New Jersey. He grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey. When he was 12, his family moved to Fort Lee, New Jersey.

He went to Harvard University. There, he studied English, philosophy, and chemistry. He finished his studies at Harvard in 1948.

What Did William Labov Do?

After college, Labov worked as a chemist in his family's business. This was from 1949 to 1961. Then, he decided to study linguistics instead.

For his master's degree in 1963, he studied how people spoke on Martha's Vineyard. This is an island in Massachusetts. He showed his findings to the Linguistic Society of America. He then earned his PhD in 1964 from Columbia University. His teacher was Uriel Weinreich.

Labov taught linguistics at Columbia from 1964 to 1970. In 1971, he became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He later became the director of the university's Linguistics Laboratory in 1976.

How Did He Study Language?

William Labov developed special ways to collect information about language. He used these methods for his study of how English is spoken in New York City. This study was published in 1966 as The Social Stratification of English in New York City. His methods became very important for studying how social groups use language differently.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he also studied African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This is a variety of English spoken by many African Americans. Labov showed that AAVE is a complete and rule-governed way of speaking. He argued that it should not be seen as "bad" English. Instead, it should be respected as its own form of English.

Labov also studied how people tell stories about their own lives. He looked at how ordinary people structure these stories. Some of his classes even involved students helping young children in West Philadelphia. This helped students learn about different ways of speaking, like AAVE.

How Do English Sounds Change?

More recently, Labov studied how the sounds of English are changing in the United States. He looked at how vowel sounds can shift in a "chain." This means one sound changes, which then causes another sound to change, and so on.

In a book called Atlas of North American English (2006), Labov and his co-authors found three main vowel shifts happening:

• A Southern Shift in places like Appalachia and southern coastal areas.
• A Northern Cities Vowel Shift in a region from Madison, Wisconsin, to Utica, New York.
• A Canadian Shift across most of Canada.

They also found smaller shifts in other areas.

Many students learned from Labov, including Charles Boberg and John R. Rickford. His methods were also used by other linguists. For example, Peter Trudgill used them to study speech in Norwich, England.

Understanding Stories: Narrative Analysis

In one important work, "Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience," Labov and Joshua Waletzky looked at how people tell stories. They focused on stories told out loud. They wanted to find the main parts of a story.

Labov said that stories have two jobs:

• Referential: This part sets up the story. It tells you who, what, where, and when. It puts events in the right order.
• Evaluative: This part shows why the storyteller is telling the story. It shows what the story means to them.

Labov studied many interviews with children and adults from different backgrounds. He divided stories into five or six parts:

• Abstract: A quick summary of the story.
• Orientation: Clues that tell the listener about the people, place, time, and situation before the main story starts.
• Complicating action: The main part of the story where things happen. A story can have many of these parts.
• Evaluation: The storyteller shows how they feel about the story. This can be clear or subtle. It shows the story's importance.
• Resolution: The ending of the story, which gives it a sense of completion.
• Coda: This brings the listener back to the present moment. It's like saying, "And that's my story." Not all stories have a coda.

Labov showed that stories have a clear structure. He argued that events in a story must be told in the order they happened. This is because the meaning of the story depends on that order. He called the "basic unit of narrative" a narrative clause. These clauses are separated by temporal junctures, which mark a shift in time.

Labov's ideas were important because they came from real-life examples. He and his team recorded people telling stories. This helped them understand how stories are built.

The Golden Age Principle

One of Labov's interesting ideas about language change is called the Golden Age Principle. This idea says that when people notice changes in how language sounds or in its grammar, they usually react negatively.

Labov explained it like this:

Communities differ in the extent to which they stigmatize the newer forms of language, but I have never yet met anyone who greeted them with applause. Some older citizens welcome the new music and dances, the new electronic devices and computers. But no one has ever been heard to say, "It's wonderful the way young people talk today. It's so much better than the way we talked when I was a kid." ... The most general and most deeply held belief about language is the Golden Age Principle: At some time in the past, language was in a state of perfection. It is understood that in such a state, every sound was correct and beautiful, and every word and expression was proper, accurate, and appropriate. Furthermore, the decline from that state has been regular and persistent, so that every change represents a falling away from the golden age, rather than a return to it. Every new sound will be heard as ugly, and every new expression will be heard as improper, inaccurate, and inappropriate. Given this principle it is obvious that language change must be interpreted as nonconformity to established norms, and that people will reject changes in the structure of language when they become aware of them.

Basically, people often believe that language was "perfect" in the past. They think any new changes make it worse. They might see new sounds as "ugly" or new words as "wrong." This means people often don't like language changes when they notice them.

Personal Life

William Labov had five children from his first marriage to Teresa Gnasso Labov. Their names are Susannah, Sarah, Simon, Joanna, and Jessie. In 1993, he married another sociolinguist named Gillian Sankoff. They had two children, Rebecca and Alice Goffman. William Labov adopted Alice after her father, Gillian's previous husband, passed away.

William Labov passed away on December 17, 2024, at the age of 97.

Awards and Honors

William Labov received many awards for his important work:

• In 1968, he won the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in Teaching English.
• He was a Guggenheim Fellow twice, in 1970–71 and 1987–88.
• He received honorary doctorates from universities like Uppsala University (1985) and University of Edinburgh (2005).
• He won the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) twice. First in 1996 for Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 1, and again in 2008 for Atlas of North American English.
• In 2013, he received a Franklin Institute Award. This was for showing how our minds understand language changes and for studying different dialects.
• Also in 2013, he received another honorary doctorate from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. This was for his great teaching and research in linguistics.
• In 2015, he received the Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics from the British Academy. This was for his lifetime achievements in studying linguistics.
• In 2020, he was given the Talcott Parsons Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This award recognizes important contributions to social sciences.

See also

In Spanish: William Labov para niños