What Did William Labov Find Out?
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].
What did Norman Labov find in his 1966 New York study?
What did he find out? Labov found a higher use of rhoticity in all social classes when reading the word list as opposed to in an interview. ... From a sociolinguistic point of view, this tells us that rhoticity in New York is an important, useful indicator of social status.
William Labov – New York City - All About Linguistics
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
Why did Labov choose Martha's Vineyard?
But more than his contemporaries, Labov sought to probe more deeply into the social influences of different dialects — not simply to document the subtle differences in language, but to understand why changes take place. He came to the Vineyard in the summer of 1961 for field research.
50 years of language study began on Martha's Vineyard