William Labov, ‘father of sociolinguistics’ who studied the Philadelphia accent, dies at 97

William Labov, the father of sociolinguistics who spent decades recording how Philadelphians talk, calling the city the “gold standard” for studying language patterns, died Tuesday, Dec. 17, in his Washington Square home at the age of 97. He died of complications from Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Labov approached language as something that by its nature was variable, not governed by an ideal set of rules of grammar. His work changed whose dialects linguists saw worthy of study and dove into the socioeconomic politics of language. The way he saw it, dialects touched everything, from how you’re viewed to how you learn.

“He really believed that every single person on the planet is worth talking to and has something to learn from,” said Gillian Sankoff, his wife and fellow sociolinguist at the University of Pennsylvania. The pair married in 1993.

Dr. Labov was born in Passaic, N.J., on Dec. 4, 1927, and raised in Rutherford, N.J. He majored in English and philosophy at Harvard University but also dabbled in chemistry, which he would use working as an industrial chemist before returning to school to study linguistics. He studied and worked at Columbia University before landing in 1971 at the University of Pennsylvania, where he would conduct some of his most lasting work.

Dr. Labov’s influence and innovations in linguistics can be broken into two categories: the technical and conceptual.

On the technical side, Dr. Labov relied less on intuition than his predecessors, taking a clinical and statistical approach by recording his subjects and analyzing them on a computer before the technology became ubiquitous. He also transformed how linguists viewed language changes, researching these shifts in real time — like when he found the “Southern-inflected sound” of Philadelphia was slowly turning into a more “Northern” accent.

Bigger still was the choice to study speech patterns and changes in communities that would have been ignored. Dr. Labov took an interest in how Puerto Ricans in New York City talked and what he distinguished as African American English.

Dr. Labov believed “everyday vernacular” was worthy of organizing and he didn’t dismiss dialects that might appear to carry errors because they don’t follow mainstream rules, former student and linguist Josef Fruehwald said.

“People aren’t chaotic as they’re speaking,” said Fruehwald. “There’s structure to the pattern of variation they’re using.”

Dr. Labov’s sociolinguistic views had a real-life impact. For example, he thought the disconnect between how young Black students spoke and their school materials contributed to lower reading scores. He testified as much in a 1979 federal lawsuit dubbed the “Black English case.” Eleven Black elementary school students successfully sued the Ann Arbor School District in Michigan for discriminating against them and failing to consider what they called a language barrier when crafting curriculums.

Passionate about bridging this learning obstacle, Dr. Labov worked with colleagues during his time at Penn to produce graphic novels using storylines and idioms that would feel familiar and draw students in.

Despite being busy with his own research, Dr. Labov also made mentoring a central part of his work, helping train and encourage generations of linguists from marginalized backgrounds. His open-door policy was twofold, said former students. He always had time for his pupils and would often pop out of his office and scan the horizon for someone to “come look!” at some new finding or language pattern he had pulled up on his computer.

“His unfailing patience, kindness, and generosity provided a model for the generations of linguists he trained here, many of whom have gone on to become highly influential linguists in their own right,” added former student Meredith Tamminga, an associate professor and graduate chair for linguistics at Penn.

When sociolinguist Betsy Sneller visited Penn as a prospective doctoral student, she remembers Dr. Labov spending two hours with her showing her an automatic vowel measurement program that hadn’t been published yet, convincing her to try it for her master’s thesis.

“Even though I was not his student, he held my hand through that, and as a result, my master’s thesis was better than it should have been,” Sneller said.

And in 2019, when The Inquirer featured linguist Grant Berry’s work analyzing vowel patterns used by Puerto Ricans in North and Northeast Philly, Dr. Labov made sure to compliment the work in an email exchange with other sociolinguists featured, even though Berry was not a student.

“It was a validation of the stuff that I was doing that was kind of related to things that he had done,” said Berry.

That generosity extended to colleagues Dr. Labov might disagree with.

“Linguists are smart,” was Dr. Labov’s mantra when it came to more esoteric topics, said Fruehwald and others. Dr. Labov didn’t try to poke holes in papers he thought were “wrong”; instead he looked for something worthwhile to take away from them. Sneller, one of Dr. Labov’s last sociolinguistic students at Penn, said he often kicked off reading group discussions with a “what have we learned?” This approach was just one part of Dr. Labov’s never-ending quest for knowledge. Linguists who knew him said he was not one to be stuck in his ways methodologically or technologically, a trap some academics can fall into.

Fruehwald recalled one particular academic conference where the programming language Python was the talk of the town as a new tool to use in linguistic research. Dr. Labov, in his late 70s or early 80s by then, spent the event toting around a Python book, trying to absorb as much of the new technology as possible.

That endless curiosity described by former students extended to his home life. If Dr. Labov wasn’t teaching his children how to spearfish in Hawaii or building them a puppet theater, he was dabbling in whatever they were interested in at the moment. He dipped his toe in theater, Eastern European languages, and literal rocket science — his only son would grow up to be a physicist — to connect with his children.

Dr. Labov is survived by his wife, Gillian Sankoff; as well as his seven children, Susannah Page, Sarah Labov, Simon Labov, Joanna Labov, Jessie Labov, Alice Goffman, and Rebecca Labov; and nine grandchildren. He was previously married to the late Teresa Gnasso. A private viewing was held Saturday at Goldstein’s Funeral Home.

The Linguistic Society of America plans to hold a memorial for Dr. Labov at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown on Thursday, Jan. 9, at 8:30 p.m.

Tom Avril contributed to this article.