{"id":18890,"date":"2024-12-24T21:18:18","date_gmt":"2024-12-24T22:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=18890"},"modified":"2024-12-24T22:31:07","modified_gmt":"2024-12-24T22:31:07","slug":"william-labov-who-studied-how-society-shapes-language-dies-at-97","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=18890","title":{"rendered":"William Labov, Who Studied How Society Shapes Language, Dies at 97"},"content":{"rendered":"
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He laid the foundation for sociolinguistics, and he showed that structures like class and race shaped speech as much as where someone lives.<\/p>\n

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William Labov, whose innovative research into regional variations in language \u2014 why New Yorkers drink wahtah but Philadelphians drink warter \u2014 won him acclaim as one of the most important linguists of the 20th century, died on Dec. 17 at his home in Philadelphia, where he had spent nearly 50 years as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was 97.<\/p>\n

Gillian Sankoff, his wife, said the cause was complications of Parkinson\u2019s disease.<\/p>\n

Dr. Labov (pronounced luh-BOEV) was considered the founder of sociolinguistics, a field that focuses on the way social structures like class, gender and race shape language \u2014 and vice versa.<\/p>\n

Unlike most linguists before him, whose work was largely theoretical, he insisted on the importance of field work: He accumulated thousands of hours of tape-recorded interviews, which he would then dissect to isolate discrete differences in vowels and consonants.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe work that I really want to do, the excitement and adventure of the field, comes in meeting the speakers of the language face to face, entering their homes, hanging out on corners, porches, taverns, pubs and bars,\u201d he wrote in a 1987 paper.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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To capture language as it is actually spoken, Dr. Labov devised clever methods to get people to let down their guard. In one famous study, he went to three department stores in New York City \u2014 high-end Saks Fifth Avenue, middle-class Macy\u2019s and budget-level S. Klein \u2014 and asked for an item he knew was on the third or fourth floor.<\/p>\n

What he found confirmed his hypothesis that the New York accent was shaped not just by region but by class: The more expensive the store, the more likely he was to hear the \u201cr\u2019s\u201d in \u201cfourth floor.\u201d<\/p>\n

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He laid the foundation for sociolinguistics, and he showed that structures like class and race shaped speech as much as where someone lives.William Labov, whose innovative research into regional variations in language \u2014 why New Yorkers drink wahtah but Philadelphians drink warter \u2014 won him acclaim as one of the most important linguists of the 20th century, died on Dec. 17 at his home in Philadelphia, where he had spent nearly 50 years as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was 97.Gillian Sankoff, his wife, said the cause was complications of Parkinson\u2019s disease.Dr. Labov (pronounced luh-BOEV) was considered the founder of sociolinguistics, a field that focuses on the way social structures like class, gender and race shape language \u2014 and vice versa.Unlike most linguists before him, whose work was largely theoretical, he insisted on the importance of field work: He accumulated thousands of hours of tape-recorded interviews, which he would then dissect to isolate discrete differences in vowels and consonants.\u201cThe work that I really want to do, the excitement and adventure of the field, comes in meeting the speakers of the language face to face, entering their homes, hanging out on corners, porches, taverns, pubs and bars,\u201d he wrote in a 1987 paper.To capture language as it is actually spoken, Dr. Labov devised clever methods to get people to let down their guard. In one famous study, he went to three department stores in New York City \u2014 high-end Saks Fifth Avenue, middle-class Macy\u2019s and budget-level S. Klein \u2014 and asked for an item he knew was on the third or fourth floor.What he found confirmed his hypothesis that the New York accent was shaped not just by region but by class: The more expensive the store, the more likely he was to hear the \u201cr\u2019s\u201d in \u201cfourth floor.\u201dWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18892,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18890"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18893,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18890\/revisions\/18893"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}