When Was Labov's New York Study?
1966 - In 1962, Labov ([1966] 2006) completed the “New York department store study,” which examined overt prestige involving class, ethnicity, and gender. He investigated the pronunciation of postvocalic /r/ in New York City speech, in the words fourth and floor.
What did Labov's 1962 study on New York City English find?
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
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
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 sociolinguistics founded?
The study of the social motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century. The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of his 1939 article "Sociolinguistics in India" published in Man in India.
Sociolinguistics - Wikipedia