William Labov

William Labov ( born December 4, 1927 in Rutherford, New Jersey) is an American linguist who mainly researches language change and language variation.

Life and work

Labov is a student of Yiddish linguist Uriel Weinreich, who had worked intensively on language change in dialektologischer variation and language contact. In the sixties, Labov laid the foundations for the empirical study of linguistic changes. His study area are the dialects of Philadelphia and New York. His studies are mainly attributable to the sociolinguistics. William Labov is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

William Labov was born in 1927 in Rutherford (New Jersey), a small town outside of New York. In 1939 he moved to Fort Lee, where he noticed for the first time that people pronounce the same words differently. At this time Labov saw the movie " Pygmalion ," in which the main characters each wrote down sound that his antagonist uttered. The main character, Henry Higgins was tailored to Henry Sweet, the great English phonologists, the Labov admired. From him he took some knowledge on the principles of change of language and converted it into a more modern version. After college, Labov first worked for some time in a company where he brought his knowledge of chemistry, which he had acquired in the study.

When he had left the industry in 1961, he went back to university to do research on the English language.

Labov 1963 explored the language on the small island of Martha 's Vineyard near Cape Cod, where Labov noticed a peculiar pronunciation of the words "right", "ice " and " sight", in which the vowel is pronounced in the middle of the mouth. This abnormality was more pronounced among young people; it varied from person to person, depending on which profession they followed, where they lived on the island and what a migration background they had. For example, a difference between Indians and Portuguese was seen.

In 1968 a survey Labov project to find out whether the dialect that was spoken among African - American youth in Harlem, has something to do with deficiencies in the teaching of reading in schools. Together with its white and African-American colleagues Labov began a detailed study of all social groups in Harlem, by observing these groups. The result showed that there were large differences between African-American and white speech patterns. Labov wrote here about a book that defended the native language of African-Americans to be absolutely suitable for logical thinking and reading.

Labov was his projects and surveys also cite as evidence in court, because in 1987 there were several phone calls with bomb threats at the airport of Los Angeles. A man named Paul Prinzivalle was accused of having made ​​these threats because of his voice had been identified. The counsel for the defendant sent the recordings to Labov, because he should distinguish two different types of the New York dialect. Labov came relatively quickly to the conclusion that the accused was by no means the caller. Labov also used all his previous research and work, including the project on Martha 's Vineyard, for the apology for Prinzivalle. In the end, the accused was acquitted because Labov had done an objective and strong evidence, according to opinion of the Court. This success showed that Labov was able to separate from each other by his linguistic researches fact and fiction.

Labov was awarded in Cognitive Sciences for 2013, the Benjamin Franklin Medal.