| William Labov |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT WILLIAM LABOV | |
| 1927 births | |
| living people | |
| american linguists | |
| sociolinguists | |
| university of pennsylvania faculty | |
| jewish american scientists | |
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William Labov (; born December 4 , 1927 ) is an American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist Sociolinguistics .E.g., in the opening chapter of ''The Handbook of Language Variation and Change'' (ed. Chambers et al., Blackwell 2002), J.K. Chambers writes that "variationist sociolinguistics had its effective beginnings only in 1963, the year in which William Labov presented the first sociolinguistic research report"; the dedication page of the ''Handbook'' says that Labov's "ideas imbue every page". He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics.1 He is employed as a professor in the Linguistics department of the University Of Pennsylvania , and pursues research in sociolinguistics, language change, and Dialectology . Born in , and he is noted for his seminal studies of the way ordinary people structure narrative stories of their own lives. More recently he has studied changes in the phonology of English as spoken in the United States today, and studied the origins and patterns of (in Appalachia and southern coastal regions) and a Northern Cities Shift affecting a region from Madison, Wisconsin east to Utica, New York , as well as several minor chain shifts in smaller regions. Labov's works include ''Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English Vernacular'' ( 1972 ), ''Sociolinguistic Patterns'' (1972), ''Principles of Linguistic Change'' (vol.I Internal Factors, 1994 ; vol.II Social Factors, 2001 ), and, together with Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg, ''The Atlas of North American English'' ( 2006 ). NOTES EXTERNAL LINKS
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