What Did William Labov Do?
William Labov (b. 1927) is an American linguist who pioneered the study of variationist sociolinguistics. ... Labov's early research was greatly influential and inspired many scholars to carry out similar projects in other communities. The paradigm came to be known as variationist sociolinguistics.
What are the contributions of William Labov to the development of sociolinguistics?
Labov is regarded as the founder of variationist sociolinguistics, which is a discipline dedicated to understanding and researching language in relation to social factors that include region, race, class, and gender.
Pioneering Sociolinguist William Labov Receiving Social ...
What did William Labov find out?
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, his studies of the linguistic features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) were also influential: he argued that AAVE should not be stigmatized as substandard, but rather respected as a variety of English with its own grammatical rules.
William Labov - Wikipedia
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
The central ideas of variationist sociolinguistics are that an understanding of language requires an understanding of variable as well as categorical processes, and that the variation witnessed at all levels of language is not random.
Variationist Sociolinguistics - Oxford Handbooks Online