A version of Bill Labov’s Columbia University MA study of phonological variation on Martha’s Vineyard was published in 1963, the same year I began my graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin. So immersed was I in general, theoretical, historical, and dialectological matters that I did not come to this innovative approach to variation studies until 1967–68, when I finally got around to reading his ground-breaking study of variation in New York City English (Reference Labov1966). It changed how I was to do linguistics in my own career and led me on to read Weinreich, Labov and Herzog’s “Empirical foundations for a theory of language change” (Reference Weinreich, Labov, Herzog, Lehman and Malkiel1968, much of it summarized and expanded in his better-known 1972 Sociolinguistic patterns). That work emphasized the independence and importance of the study of what they called “subjective correlates,” one of the five problems to be solved in the study of language variation and change. It justified and influenced my growing interests in variation in emerging language and dialect acquisition situations, perceptual dialectology, folk linguistics, pragmatically detectable implicit social meanings, and the general area of what I have come to call “language regard” (Preston, Reference Preston, Gilles, Scharloth and Zeigler2010).
Bill was a friend of dialectology, although he was aware of Chambers and Trudgill’s cautionary dictate that warned “Dialectology without sociolinguistics at its core is a relic” (Chambers & Trudgill, Reference Chambers and Trudgill1980). Any inspection of the Martha’s Vineyard article, however, will show his debt to and admiration for the Linguistic Atlas of New England (Kurath et al., Reference Kurath1939). His respect for dialectology led to our eventual personal acquaintance and friendship beginning in the early 1980s. I leave aside anecdotes of this relationship; a few are recorded in Chambers (Reference Chambers2017). Over the years, Bill more than once observed to me that the field had no journal dedicated to dialectology and that that gap hindered the study of variation and change that was being contributed to by recent advances in dialectology as well as others in language typology, areal studies of linguistic phenomena, and other geographically oriented approaches.
Over one of the many good meals we shared, Bill asked why we should not propose just such an outlet. As this plot thickened, he was insistent that the journal’s name should reflect the breadth of our intent and that the online presence of the journal should allow for detailed map viewing (zooming, panning, etc.) as well as embedded informative notes and active audio files. Bill and I presented ourselves as editors to Cambridge University Press, provided a model for its (and later) complex online presence, identified a distinguished and international Editorial Board, and the implementation got underway, including selection of the journal as one supported by the International Conference on Methods in Dialectology.
The resulting Journal of Linguistic Geography, now beginning its 13th year, was only one of Bill’s contributions to our field, but it was one he was committed to and had high hopes for. Without him it would not have happened, not have taken the shape it did, and not have had whatever success it has had in fulfilling this apparent gap in outlets for areal approaches to the study of language variation and change. Bill eventually asked to be relieved of active editorial duties, and Professor Francisco Moreno-Fernández (Heidelberg) became the new Co-Editor. He and I and the entire editorial staff are committed to the continuation of Bill’s good idea and hope this journal is one small piece of the living evidence of his monumental legacy.
Open access
