When someone wishes Penn Linguistics professor Bill Labov a Murry Christmas, he can tell that the speaker is a Philadelphia native.
Labov casts a wide net with his research; he recently co-authored the Atlas of North American English, a resource of pronunciation and vowel sounds from across the continent. But though his research spans spans far and wide, he has a special knack for Philadelphia linguistics.
In fact, he said he decided to move to the city in the first place because it is "the best known city in many ways" for sociolinguistic phenomena.
The city is particularly interesting because it shares many speech patterns with areas in the South, Labov said, adding that it is referred to as "the northernmost of southern cities."
For example, many Philadelphians will pronounce the word tire like tar or will pronounce the word iron like ahron, he said.
Philadelphians also tend to pronounce crown and crayon in the same way and have the tendency to drop the second R-sound in names like Gerard.
Speech in Philadelphia, he said, is also similar to speech in Wilmington, Del., and Baltimore, but very different from speech in New York.
He also studies how new ethnic populations, such as Philadelphia's Asian community, adapt to the city's manners of speech.
But college students most likely won't adopt Philadelphia speech habits if they did not live in the city before the age of nine, Labov said.
Third-year Linguistics graduate student Aaron Dinkin, who studies with Labov, said Philadelphia is a unique city because of the way natives pronounce vowels.
"More than half the vowels are involved or were involved in some kind of sound change," he said.
For Dinkin, the appeal of studying with Labov was enough to draw him to the University.
"The reason I decided to come to Penn is so I could work with Bill," he said.
Labov is the founder of sociolinguistics, which attempts to not only study how language changes over time, but also to discover who changes it and what these changes say about societies, Labov said.
"Language is not in itself important," he said. "But it reflects what is going on in the world."
