Why would a guy like Labov study something like this?
Well, aside from the fact that academics will study anything, Labov wanted to change the way inner-city children were perceived and taught in public schools. As he points out in his book, before this point most teachers and administrators started from the assumption that poor urban Black children automatically suffered from “cultural deprivation.” The theory was that since these children were never taken to museums or classical music concerts or read to by their parents, they grew up without having been exposed to any form of “culture” at all, and this included verbal culture. The prevailing wisdom was that children from these homes were not verbally stimulated enough, and that as a result many of them arrived at school with almost no verbal skills, sometimes literally not having learned to talk. Thus, they needed to be taught how to talk before anything else could happen. What Labov’s research showed is that these children were considered nonverbal because a) race and class relations
