Labov, William (1927–2024)

William Labov was the dominant figure in sociolinguistics from its emergence in the mid-1960s until the current era.Having studied with Uriel Weinreich at Columbia, he also taught there until 1970 before founding the sociolinguistics program at the University of Pennsylvania, which has become the mecca for the discipline.Through Weinreich, Labov was exposed to the most progressive view of language extant in classical linguistics, its variability and changeability across space, time, speakers, domains, and contexts.With Weinreich, Labov laid down a program for the empirical study of language in the speech community in 1968 (Weinrich, Labov, & Herzog, 1968), thus making the bridge between the traditional study of language and the new field of sociolinguistics.His 1963 MA project on a sound change in progress in Martha's Vineyard and his 1964 PhD thesis on the sociolinguistic stratification of New York City introduced techniques of sample surveys, natural experimentation, and quantitative analysis into sociolinguistic research (Labov, 1966).However, it was in his independent study of African American vernacular English in Harlem starting in 1965 that he made the paradigmatic breakthroughs underlying the modern field of linguistic variation theory (Labov, 1972a(Labov, , 1972b).Labov's intent was an empirical, rigorous, and reproducible approach to language as it is actually used, namely a scientific linguistics.His ambivalence about the label "sociolinguistics, " in analogy to other hyphenated domains such as psycho-linguistics and educational linguistics, reflects his overarching project of advancing linguistic theory by grounding it in solid data and objective analyses rather than subjective intuitions and polemic debate, without sacrificing the creative roles of scientific insight and intricate inductive and deductive reasoning.Key components of this approach include the following:(a) The resolution of Saussure's paradox-the incompatibility of synchronic and diachronic theorizing-through the establishment and validation of the