William Labov, Who Studied How Society Shapes Language, Dies at 97

U.S.|William Labov, Who Studied How Society Shapes Language, Dies at 97

William Labov, whose innovative research into regional variations in language — why New Yorkers drink wahtah but Philadelphians drink warter — 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’s 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 — 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.

“The 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,” 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 — high-end Saks Fifth Avenue, middle-class Macy’s and budget-level S. Klein — 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 “r’s” in “fourth floor.”