Language Change in Philadelphia
William Labov
Fassit Professor of Linguistics
I first came to Philadelphia in 1970 to study linguistic change in progress. And I’m still astonished at the rapid rate of linguistic change in this city. As you enter the city you’ll hear that older Philadelphians say “Get out” and younger Philadelphians say “Geddauot,” so that “crown” and “crayon” are pronounced the same, “craoun.” In Philadelphia, “l” between two vowels tends to disappear, so that “new balance” and “new bounce” sound the same. And even local Philadelphians find it hard to understand the word “ruer” in the sentence, “She smacked my hands with a ruer.”
We know that these changes interfere with communication because our study of natural misunderstandings show that a full 25 percent are due to such dialect differences. We’ve now published this atlas for all of North America. But Philadelphia remains a strategic research site for the study of the question, what are the causes of linguistic change? Which integrates for us a more profound inquiry into the question of how rational we are, and what are the limits of our rationality, a problem that remains to be solved.