Editing William Labov (section)

==Linguistic research==
The methods Labov used to collect data for his study of the varieties of [[English language|English]] spoken in [[New York City]], published as ''The Social Stratification of English in New York City'' (1966), have been influential in social dialectology. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, his studies of the linguistic features of [[African American Vernacular English]] (AAVE) were also influential:<ref name="Chambers"/> he argued that AAVE should not be stigmatized as substandard, but rather respected as a variety of English with its own grammatical rules.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Wheeler |first1=R. |title="So Much Research, So Little Change": Teaching Standard English in African American Classrooms |journal=Annual Review of Linguistics |date=14 January 2016 |volume=2 |pages=367–390 |doi=10.1146/ANNUREV-LINGUISTICS-011415-040434 |doi-access=free}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |url=https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95sep/ets/labo.htm |title=Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence |date=June 1972 |access-date=March 28, 2015 |publisher=The Atlantic |last=Labov |first=William}}</ref>

He also pursued research in [[referential indeterminacy]]<ref>{{cite book |last1=Andersen |first1=Øivin |title=Indeterminacy in Terminology and LSP: Studies in honour of Heribert Picht|chapter=Indeterminacy, context, economy and well-formedness in specialist communication |date=9 May 2007 |publisher=John Benjamins Publishing Company |isbn=978-90-272-2332-6 |url=https://www.oivinandersen.com/publications/OCR-read/Indeterminacy0001.pdf |language=en}}</ref> and is noted for his studies of the way ordinary people structure narrative stories of their own lives.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Lamb |first1=Gavin |title=The Linguistics Of Narrating Personal Experience |url=https://medium.com/thewildones/narrating-personal-experience-the-6-key-linguistic-elements-of-conversational-storytelling-ea45b09a90c2 |website=Wild Ones |access-date=27 March 2023 |language=en |date=26 February 2021}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Johnstone |first1=Barbara |title='Oral versions of personal experience': Labovian narrative analysis and its uptake |journal=Journal of Sociolinguistics |date=September 2016 |volume=20 |issue=4 |pages=542–560 |doi=10.1111/josl.12192 |s2cid=151597119 |url=https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12192 |access-date=27 March 2023 |language=en |issn=1360-6441|url-access=subscription }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Wang |first1=Yue |title=Narrative Structure Analysis: A Story from "Hannah Gadsby: Nanette" |journal=Journal of Language Teaching and Research |date=1 September 2020 |volume=11 |issue=5 |pages=682 |doi=10.17507/jltr.1105.03 |s2cid=225274833 |issn=1798-4769 |doi-access=free}}</ref> Several of his classes were service-based, with students going to West Philadelphia to help tutor young children while simultaneously learning linguistics from different dialects such as AAVE.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Benson |first1=Lee |last2=Harkavy |first2=Ira |last3=Puckett |first3=John |title=An Implementation Revolution as a Strategy for Fulfilling the Democratic Promise of University-Community Partnerships: Penn-West Philadelphia as an Experiment in Progress |journal=Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly |date=March 2000 |volume=29 |issue=1 |pages=24–45 |doi=10.1177/0899764000291003 |s2cid=145641409 |url=https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0899764000291003 |access-date=27 March 2023 |language=en |issn=0899-7640|url-access=subscription }}</ref>

Later, Labov studied ongoing changes in the phonology of English as spoken in the U.S., as well as the origins and patterns of [[chain shift]]s of vowels (one sound replacing a second, replacing a third, in a complete chain). In the ''Atlas of North American English'' (2006), he and his co-authors find three major divergent chain shifts taking place today: a [[Southern American English#Shared features|Southern Shift]] (in [[Appalachia]] and southern coastal regions); a [[Northern Cities Vowel Shift]] affecting a region from [[Madison, Wisconsin]], east to [[Utica, New York]]; and a [[Canadian Shift]] affecting most of Canada, in addition to several minor chain shifts in smaller regions.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Armstrong |first1=Eric |title=Book Review The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change by William Labov, Sharon Ash, & Charles Boberg |journal=Voice and Speech Review |date=January 2007 |volume=5 |issue=1 |pages=394–395 |doi=10.1080/23268263.2007.10769800 |s2cid=161671407 |language=en |issn=2326-8263}}</ref>

Among Labov's well-known students are [[Charles Boberg]], [[Anne H. Charity Hudley]], [[Penelope Eckert]], [[Gregory Guy]], [[Robert A. Leonard]], [[Geoffrey Nunberg]], [[Shana Poplack]], and [[John R. Rickford]]. His methods were adopted in England around 1972 by [[Peter Trudgill]] for Norwich speech and [[K. M. Petyt]] for West Yorkshire speech. On a sabbatical in England shortly after, [[Jack Chambers (linguist)|J. K. Chambers]], reading Trudgill's tattered copy of ''Sociolinguistic Patterns'', left formal linguistics to become a sociolinguist.<ref>''Canadian Journal of Linguistics'', 2005, festschrift for J. K. Chambers.</ref>

Labov's works include ''The Study of Nonstandard English'' (1969), ''Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English Vernacular'' (1972), ''Sociolinguistic Patterns'' (1972),<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Attinasi |first1=John J. |title=The sociolinguistics of William Labov |journal=Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe |date=1974 |volume=1 |issue=3 |pages=279–304 |jstor=25743604 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25743604 |issn=0094-5366}}</ref> ''Principles of Linguistic Change'' (vol.I Internal Factors, 1994; vol.II Social Factors, 2001, vol.III Cognitive and Cultural factors, 2010),<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Milroy |first1=James |title=William Labov, Principles of linguistic change. Volume I: Internal factors (Language in Society 20). Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Pp. xix + 641. |journal=Journal of Linguistics |date=September 1995 |volume=31 |issue=2 |pages=435–439 |doi=10.1017/S0022226700015693 |s2cid=145806007 |url=https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226700015693 |access-date=27 March 2023 |language=en |issn=1469-7742|url-access=subscription }}</ref> and, with Sharon Ash and [[Charles Boberg]], ''[[The Atlas of North American English]]'' (2006).<ref name=LBBA2019/>

The [[Franklin Institute]] awarded Labov the 2013 [[Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute)|Benjamin Franklin Medal]] in Computer and Cognitive Science, citing him for "establishing the cognitive basis of language variation and change through rigorous analysis of linguistic data, and for the study of non-standard dialects with significant social and cultural implications".<ref name="Avril_2012"/><ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.fi.edu/laureates/william-labov |title=Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science |date=September 5, 2014 |publisher=[[Franklin Institute]] |access-date=September 9, 2014}}</ref>