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William "Bill" Labov born December 4, 1927 age 89 Born in Rutherford, New Jersey,) William

Labov is a famous American Linguist who is known for his contributions to the field of
Linguistics particularly for his article "The Social Stratification of the letter R in the New
York City".He is employed as a professor in the linguistics department of the University of
Pennsylvania and pursues research in sociolinguistics, language change, and dialectology. He semi-
retired at the end of spring 2014.

He studied at Harvard University in 1948. He first worked as an industrial chemist from


1949 to 1961 before making changes to his career path when he entered the field of
linguistics. He pursued his MA thesis in 1963 in which, he studied the change of dialect in
Martha's Vineyard. Martha's Vineyard is an island located south of Cape Cod in
Massachusetts. His thesis was presented before the Linguistic Society of America. In 1964
William then took his PhD at Columbia University studying under Uriel Weinreich. He
taught at that university from 1964 to 1970. He then moved on to become a professor of
linguistcs at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. William became the director of the
university's Linguistics Labratory in 1977. William Labov had been married to sociologist,
Teresa Gnasso Labov. However, after his marriage ended, he later remarried to another
sociolinguist, Gillian Sankoff in 1993. William Labov acquired many positions throughout
his years. He was a Gugganheim Fellow in 1970 to 1971 and 1987 to 1988, a member of
the National Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1979 and a member of National
Academy of Sciences since 1993. He is currently in a fellowship in the American
Association for the Advance of Science since 1997.
WIlliam Labov's honorary degrees include: U. of Uppsala, 1985; U. of Lige, 1990, U. of
York 1998, U. ofEdinburgh 2005, U. of Paris X, Nanterre 2007. Marthas vineyard Social
Stratification of "r" in NYC Willam Labov spent many years studying different dialects. A
dialect he once studied was the African-American vernacular English. This was him
discussing how different dialects affect African American students. Such as adding -ed to
make a word past tense. An essay he wrote on this topic was called Academic Ignorance
and Black Intelligence in June 1972. William Labovs Marthas Vineyard research showed
that accent/dialect features tend to be distributed systematically across a community. His
study showed how people adapt to different accents and dialects over time and start to
use it normally in their own speech. Marthas Vineyard is an island with about 6000 as its
population, but about 40, 000 visitors over the summer. So as more and more people
came to the island, the people living on the island adapted to the speech of the visitors and
started to use their accents normally when they spoke. They subconsciously imitated the
way their visitors talked. For these people the new pronunciation was an innovation and as
time went by the innovation gradually became the norm for those living on the island. He
interviewed different generations living on the island and the younger the generation was
the more they spoke like the visitors and less like the older generation. All of his studies
and research led him to believe that observing and recording sound changes is not
enough to understand the process of change.
Labovs career in linguistics began in 1961, when he entered graduate school at Columbia
University, after having worked for several years as an industrial chemist. He quickly made a name
for himself as both his Master's thesis and his doctoral dissertation became landmark studies for
the burgeoning field of sociolinguistics (see Labov 1963 cited under Studies of Language Change
and Labov 1966 cited under the Role of Social Variables). In the five decades since, Labov has
taken up a broad array of topics in his research and has established a distinctive approach under
the label variationist sociolinguistics.

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