Giving Voice: William Labov on the Human Core of Language

During his 50-year career, Bill Labov has interviewed thousands of people to create a groundbreaking database of spoken American English. To get these men and women to tell their stories, he asks them about important things, up to and including life and death. He’s learned a lot about language and a lot about the people who use it, and the biggest is this: “Everybody has something to say."  

In academia, Penn’s John H. and Margaret B. Fassitt Professor of Linguistics is internationally acknowledged as the pioneer of sociolinguistics, the first to study how people actually talk and to devise ways to gather real data. He has a pile of groundbreaking books and papers, including The Social Stratification of English in New York City, Language in the Inner City, and the three-volume Principles of Linguistic Change, and he has been cited thousands of times.  

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