William Labov, Who Studied How Society Shapes Language, Dies at 97

He laid the foundation for sociolinguistics, and he showed that structures like class and race shaped speech as much as where someone lives.

William Labov, whose innovative research into regional variations in language — why New Yorkers drink wahtah but Philadelphians drink warter — won him acclaim as one of the most important linguists of the 20th century, died on Dec. 17 at his home in Philadelphia, where he had spent nearly 50 years as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was 97.

Gillian Sankoff, his wife, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Labov (pronounced luh-BOEV) was considered the founder of sociolinguistics, a field that focuses on the way social structures like class, gender and race shape language — and vice versa.

Unlike most linguists before him, whose work was largely theoretical, he insisted on the importance of field work: He accumulated thousands of hours of tape-recorded interviews, which he would then dissect to isolate discrete differences in vowels and consonants.

“The work that I really want to do, the excitement and adventure of the field, comes in meeting the speakers of the language face to face, entering their homes, hanging out on corners, porches, taverns, pubs and bars,” he wrote in a 1987 paper.

To capture language as it is actually spoken, Dr. Labov devised clever methods to get people to let down their guard. In one famous study, he went to three department stores in New York City — high-end Saks Fifth Avenue, middle-class Macy’s and budget-level S. Klein — and asked for an item he knew was on the third or fourth floor.

What he found confirmed his hypothesis that the New York accent was shaped not just by region but by class: The more expensive the store, the more likely he was to hear the “r’s” in “fourth floor.”

What was more, he recognized that the salespeople he asked at Saks were unlikely to be upper class themselves — instead, he concluded, they code-switched to a type of speech that fit their customers.

He then measured his findings using a complex set of metrics of his own devising, creating a body of quantitative results that could be readily compared across time and region.

“His findings were rigorous and transformative, and so innovative that if he had chosen another career, I’m not sure anyone else would have come along and made many of the discoveries he did,” John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia, wrote in an email.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Dr. Labov published groundbreaking work on the speech patterns of gang members in Harlem. He found, contrary to the stereotype that they were using slang or simply making mistakes, that they spoke a dialect with its own grammar and syntax.

“He discovered that with gang members, even though their use of ‘ain’t’ and double negatives wouldn’t pass muster with an English teacher, their logic was impeccable,” John Baugh, Dr. Labov’s first Black doctoral student, who is now a professor of linguistics at Rice University, said in an interview.

Dr. Labov’s work had a significant impact on debates about education and the Black community. In 1979 he was an expert witness in a lawsuit in which several parents in Ann Arbor, Mich., successfully sued the school district, saying that their children had been treated as mentally challenged because they spoke a Black vernacular dialect. (The court ordered the district to help teachers work with students who spoke Black vernacular English.)

Seven years earlier, he had written in The Atlantic: “There is no reason to believe that any nonstandard vernacular is in itself an obstacle to learning. The chief problem is ignorance of language on the part of all concerned. Our job as linguists is to remedy this ignorance.”

William David Labov was born on Dec. 4, 1927, in Rutherford, N.J., to Benjamin Labov, a Russian Jewish immigrant who owned a printing plant, and Rhea (White) Labov, who oversaw the home.

He grew up in Rutherford and Fort Lee, closer to New York City, and from an early age found himself noticing the slight differences in accents between the two cities, even though they were only about 10 miles apart.

Still, he was a late-blooming linguist. He studied English and chemistry at Harvard, graduating in 1948, and then returned home to work for a decade as a chemist at his father’s factory.

It was, he later said, surprisingly good training for his future career. Not only did he work with numbers and experiments, but he also spent years listening to the mix of accents among the working-class employees at the plant.

He began his doctoral work at Columbia in 1961 and immediately began overturning his new field.

On a vacation to Martha’s Vineyard, he noticed that the island’s accent was stronger among those who lived there year round than among those who came for the summer — but was weaker among teenagers who lived there full time but hoped to leave the island as adults.

He concluded that language variation was not fixed, but rather was intimately tied to social standing. Full-timers used their accent to define their status as true islanders, while their children rebelled against them to prepare for a life on the mainland.

The resulting paper, which he presented in 1962, is widely considered a founding document of sociolinguistics, both in its use of empirical methods and in its use of sociological concepts to analyze language.

Dr. Labov received his doctorate in 1964, and two years later published his first book, “The Social Stratification of English in New York City,” which included his now-famous department-store study.

He taught at Columbia until 1971, when he moved to the University of Pennsylvania — in part, he said, because he thought the city’s dazzling blend of ethnic influences made it the perfect place to study language variation.

Dr. Labov won many of the top awards in the social sciences, including the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute, which promotes science and engineering, in 2013, and the Talcott Parsons Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.

His first marriage, to Teresa Gnasso, ended in divorce. He married Dr. Sankoff, herself a noted linguist, in 1993. Along with her, he is survived by five children from his first marriage, Susannah Page, Sarah Labov, Simon Labov, Joanna Labov and Jessie Labov; a daughter from his second marriage, Rebecca Labov; the sociologist Alice Goffman, the child of Dr. Sankoff and her previous husband, the sociologist Erving Goffman, whom Dr. Labov adopted; and nine grandchildren.

Dr. Labov insisted that despite the rise of mass media, dialects and accents were growing stronger across the United States thanks to growing residential segregation — results he demonstrated in “The Atlas of North American English” (2006), written with Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg.

“People aren’t influenced by passive interaction,” he said in a 2013 video for the Franklin Institute. He added, “Personal interaction doesn’t exist with a television set.”