It is hard to overstate how influential the late William Labov was on the discipline of linguistics, and especially the fields of variationist sociolinguistics. Indeed, the first sentence of the previous link reads
Sociolinguistic studies of language variation and change in the modern tradition originated in research conducted by William Labov on Martha’s Vineyard and in New York City and Philadelphia in the 1960s and 1970s (Labov 1963, 1966, 1969, 1972a, 1972b), as well as in similar work carried out in Detroit by Shuy, Wolfram, and Riley (1968) and Wolfram (1969).
I never met Labov, nor had any connection to him, and I am not a linguist. But it is hard to think of someone whose work was so intrinsically interesting to language-lovers like me. I was saddened to hear that he recently passed away after a long and distinguished academic career. As I shared on Bluesky the other day,
In contemporary linguistics, sociolinguistics (how language is used in society) is sometimes viewed as the soft end of the discipline. Labov realized that nearly everyone gets into linguistics because sociolinguistics is *interesting*. It speaks to us because we all speak.
We all enjoy learning how our own subtle patterns of speech reveal something about ourselves, be it class status or hometown or self-image. And I find it fitting that the very first sentence of a recent paper of mine on language shift in Indonesia (PDF) cites Labov’s work on language in cities. RIP to a legend.
Tom Pepinsky 