Dr. William Labov, the founder of sociolinguistics, died at the age of 97 on December 17, 2024. He was surrounded by loved ones, including his wife, linguist Gillian Sankoff.

Bill was an incredibly influential linguist - to the field as a whole, and to many, many individual students and researchers. He pioneered the quantitative study of variation with his 1963 work about Martha's Vineyard and his 1966 PhD Dissertation: The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Many students have, and continue to be, introduced to the very idea of socially conditioned language variation through his famous Department Store Study. More than that, Bill remained an interested and involved teacher and member of the sociolinguistics community up until the end. Despite his high stature, he always showed genuine interest in the work of anyone he spoke with and had a way of making even the most novice student feel respected as a fellow linguist.

Please use this thread to discuss, mourn, remember, and celebrate the life and career of Bill Labov. Feel free to share any of your own personal memories, or links to any remembrances/posts you've seen on the internet.

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Here are some of the touching tributes that folks have written so far to celebrate his life and legacy (I'll add to this list as I see more):

• Language Log Post
• Væl Space (Josef Freuhwald)
• Remembrance by Betsy Sneller, Labov's last PhD student (you may need to have a Bluesky account to see this)
• NY Times Obituary [gift link]
  
• Philadelphia Inquirer Obituary

PS: I also highly encourage everyone to read this short but inspiring essay by Labov: "How I got into linguistics, and what I got out of it."

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This one is truly a riot

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Do you have a question about language or linguistics? You’ve come to the right subreddit! We welcome questions from people of all backgrounds and levels of experience in linguistics.

This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

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• Questions that can be answered with a simple Google or Wikipedia search — you should try Google and Wikipedia first, but we know it’s sometimes hard to find the right search terms or evaluate the quality of the results.

• Asking why someone (yourself, a celebrity, etc.) has a certain language feature — unless it’s a well-known dialectal feature, we can usually only provide very general answers to this type of question. And if it’s a well-known dialectal feature, it still belongs here.

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Do you have a question about language or linguistics? You’ve come to the right subreddit! We welcome questions from people of all backgrounds and levels of experience in linguistics.

This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

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• Questions that can be answered with a simple Google or Wikipedia search — you should try Google and Wikipedia first, but we know it’s sometimes hard to find the right search terms or evaluate the quality of the results.

• Asking why someone (yourself, a celebrity, etc.) has a certain language feature — unless it’s a well-known dialectal feature, we can usually only provide very general answers to this type of question. And if it’s a well-known dialectal feature, it still belongs here.

• Requests for transcription or identification of a feature — remember to link to audio examples.

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• All other questions.

If it’s already the weekend, you might want to wait to post your question until the new Q&A post goes up on Monday.

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So I feel like I've seen a lot of people and sources, with wiki article "proto-slavic language" coming to my mind everytime, mentioning or implying that the pronunciation of Proto-Slavic phoneme *y is something like [ɨ]. But from what I know about Rusyn, the outcome for this phoneme is something like [ɤ], and I don't feel like that the shift from [ɨ] to [ɤ] is that likely. The reason I believe that is that Proto-Slavic's *i and *u were actually lowered in both Ukrainian and Rusyn to something like [ɪ] and [ʊ], respectively, and here it can be easily implied that the pronunciation of *y was [ɯ] with lowering to [ɤ](a substitute for an unrounded [ʊ]). Another thing is the two short yers, which are commonly sited as just having that same pronunciation as in Ukrainian and Rusyn. If you know how they developed into the Slavic languages, you'll obviously understand why their pronunciation is specifically non-specified. But I think there have to be some general concensus about the possible qualities they could've possessed. I think the most likely is [i] and [u] in Proto-Balto-Slavic > [ɪ] and [ʊ] somewhere earlier in Proto-Slavic > [ɘ] and [ɵ] in later Proto-Slavic > [ɜ] and [ɞ] in later Proto-Slavic or Common Slavic and > [ɐ] in some dialects particulary South Slavic languages, where I think how I remember, the two yers merged into /a/. Due to some sources saying that the back yer was unrounded, I think what also happened was that the back yer dialectally was derounded and then together with East Slavic, lowered to central-like realisations, which resulted in a merger with the front yer due to both being unrounded and something like central [ə]. Thus the outcome for South Slavic can be explained by just lowering the schwa to [ɐ], the outcome for West Slavic by merging the uncommon schwa with front AND unrounded /ɛ/ and the outcome for East Slavic as similar process to West Slavic but with the rounding distinction in schwa kept.

Here's the wiki article I mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Slavic_language

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