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Obituary published In: Diachronica
Vol. 42:5 (2025) ► pp.699–714

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Obituary

Falling in love with humanity

Remembering Bill Labov

ORCiD logo with link | Michigan State University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Michigan State University.

Published online: 6 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.25046.sne
Abstract
William (Bill) Labov, pioneering scholar of language change, died on December 17, 2024. His MA and PhD theses in the mid 1960s revolutionized the field of language variation and change, and he spent the subsequent 60 years building on that foundation. This is a memoriam written by one of his final PhD students. This piece has two aims. The first is to invite you, the reader, into the feeling of being in Bill’s orbit. My hope is that by the end of it, you feel the same sort of love for him that many of us do. And the second is to convince you of my main thesis: that what is now understood as Bill’s genius could not have taken place without his preexisting love of humanity.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Bill’s love of humanity was fundamental to his linguistic contributions
    • 2.1Getting good data means seeing value in everyday people
      • 2.1.1Understanding speakers on their own terms
      • 2.1.2Maybe that test is actually just racist
    • 2.2Getting good data means getting people to talk to you
  • 3.Making the field bigger
  • Notes
  • References
References (39)
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