What Did Labov's Martha's Vineyard Study Show?
What did he find out? Labov found that the pronunciation of certain vowel sounds were subtly changing from the standard American pronunciations and noted that locals had a tendency to pronounce these diphthongs with a more central point, more like [əu, əi].
Born and raised in northern New Jersey, Labov studied English and philosophy at Harvard University (BA, 1948) and worked as an industrial chemist for several years before entering graduate school in linguistics at Columbia University in 1961. He completed his PhD in 1964, under the direction of Uriel Weinreich.
William Labov | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics
What is Martha's Vineyard study?
study is one of the best-known examples of empirical investigation of language variation. and language change in the entire world. A significant feature of the Martha's Vineyard (henceforth MV) study was a compari- son of the distribution of centralized and noncentralized variants among speakers of. different ages.
Forty Years of Language Change on Martha's Vineyard - jstor
Labov's research demonstrates that linguistic variation is pervasive and highly structured, revealing regular patterns of co-occurrence between language forms, such as the pronunciation of a particular vowel, and social categories, such as socioeconomic classes.
William Labov - Linguistics - Oxford Bibliographies
When was Martha's Vineyard study Labov?
Labov, "The Recent History of Some Dialect Markers in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts," in Davis 1972. the study of a speech community.
Martha's Vineyard - Stanford University