University of Pennsylvania web site tribute to William Labov

[Mark A. Mandel]

Consulting the university's web site today, I found Bill Labov's
smiling face looking out at me. (I seem to have lucked out with a
random link to http://www.upenn.edu/pip/?pip=labov). Here is the text
that appears next to it:


Leader in linguistics

William Labov is widely regarded as the father of American linguistics, so
it's fitting that he is the first person to write a comprehensive guide to
North American speech.

Labov, a Penn professor of linguistics, spent a decade writing and
researching "The Atlas of North American English," which draws on 760
telephone conversations with speakers across the continent to provide the
first coast-to-coast description of the varied dialects of the U.S. and
Canada. The book, which includes more than 130 color-coded maps and an
accompanying CD enabling readers to hear speech patterns, explains such
dialectical quirks as the different local terms for "soda" (that's "pop" to
some) and traces ongoing changes in regional dialects. Understanding those
changes, Labov says, can reveal any number of larger social trends.

" The main purpose of studying language change is getting a mirror of social
processes," says Labov. "Language is a very sensitive reflection of what's
going on in society."

-- Mark A. Mandel, Linguistic Data Consortium
    University of Pennsylvania
    [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org