Labov
| William Labov | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 4, 1927 Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Residence | Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Education |
Harvard College, B.A. (1948) Columbia University, M.A. (1963), Ph.D. (1964) |
| Occupation | Industrial chemist (1949–60), Associate professor (1971–present) |
| Employer | University of Pennsylvania |
| Known for | Variationist sociolinguistics |
| Spouse(s) | Gillian Sankoff (m. 1993) |
| Notes | |
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Labov's Curriculum vitae
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William "Bill" Labov (/ləˈboʊv/ lə-BOHV; born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics. 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.
Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, he studied at Harvard (1948) and worked as an industrial chemist (1949–61) before turning to linguistics. For his MA thesis (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 (1964) at Columbia University studying under Uriel Weinreich. He taught at Columbia (1964–70) before becoming a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania (1971), and then became director of the university's Linguistics Laboratory (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.
The methods he used to collect data for his study of the varieties of English spoken in New York City, published as The Social Stratification of English in New York City (1966), have been influential in social dialectology. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, his studies of the linguistic features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) were also influential: he argued that AAVE should not be stigmatized as substandard, but respected as a variety of English with its own grammatical rules. He has also pursued research in referential indeterminacy, and he is noted for his seminal studies of the way ordinary people structure narrative stories of their own lives. In addition, several of his classes are service-based with students going out into the West Philadelphia region to help tutor young children while simultaneously learning linguistics from different dialects such as AAVE.
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