William Labov

William Labov is an American linguist widely regarded as a founder of the modern field of variationist sociolinguistics, the study of how language use varies systematically with social factors such as class, age and ethnicity. In a landmark 1966 study, he surveyed how employees at three New York City department stores serving different social classes pronounced the letter r after vowels, showing that this single phonetic feature varied in a statistically predictable way with the store's social status, an early demonstration that language variation could be studied with the same quantitative rigor as other social phenomena. He carried out a related influential study on the island of Martha's Vineyard examining how a distinctive local vowel pronunciation related to residents' identification with the island. Labov spent most of his career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also conducted extensive research on African American Vernacular English, arguing that it is a rule-governed linguistic system in its own right rather than a deficient form of standard English.