William Labov
Labov's Background
Labov was born in Rutherford, New Jersey on December 4th 1927, he studied at Harvard University and began work as an industrial chemist before turning to sociolinguistics. In 1963 he completed a study of change in the dialect of Martha's Vineyard, which was presented before the Linguistic Society of America. Labov took his PhD in 1964 at Columbia University and taught at Columbia before becoming a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and then became director of the university's Linguistics Laboratory in 1977. He has been married to fellow sociolinguist Gillian Sankoff since 1993. Prior to his marriage to Sankoff, he was married to sociologist Teresa Gnasso Labov.
Labov's two most famous studies are the Martha's vineyard study and the department store study
Martha's vineyard study(1960)
On Martha's Vineyard a small group of fishermen began to exaggerate a tendency already existing in their speech. They did this seemingly subconsciously, in order to establish themselves as an independent social group with superior status to the despised summer visitors known in the study as "summer people". A number of other islanders regarded this group as one which epitomised old virtues and desirable values, and subconsciously imitated the way its members talked. For these people, the new pronunciation was an innovation. As more and more people came to speak in the same way, the innovation gradually became the norm for those living on the island. Labov studied the way in which this language evolved specifically with the use of diphthongs (double vowel sounds such as 'oil' and 'mouse').
The department store study (1966)
The speech of sales assistants in three Manhattan stores was studied by Labov, drawn from the top (Saks), middle (Macy's) and bottom (Klein's) of the price and fashion scale. A customer assistant in each store was approached with a factual enquiry designed to elicit the answer - "Fourth floor" (such as "where can I find the shoes") - He recorded whether the post vocalic /r/ sound in the answer was strongly pronounced i.e ("forrth floorrr" as oppose to "fouth flur"). He pretended not to have heard so he could obtain a repeat performance in careful, emphatic style. The findings were that the sales assistants from Saks used it most, those from Klein's used it least and those from Macy's showed the greatest upward shift when they were asked to repeat.
The results from the department store study highlight the main themes of the research. Frequency of use of the prestige variable final or post vocalic (r) varied with level of formality and social class
Labov still works at Philadelphia University as a professor at the age of 88.
Useful links
contact Labov
Linguistics Laboratory
3810 Walnut St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104
3810 Walnut St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104
(215) 898-4912
(215) 573-2427
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