Politics & Power Quote by William Labov

Labov’s sentence carries the cool charge of a scientist puncturing a comforting civic myth: that time, schooling, and proximity will naturally sand away difference. The pivot on "not less, but more" is doing the real work. It’s a deliberately plain construction that flips an expected story of assimilation into a story of divergence, and it does so without drama, as if the data itself were the punchline.

The intent is methodological and political at once. Methodological, because Labov is asserting a counterintuitive empirical finding: language change isn’t a one-way escalator toward a standardized norm. Political, because the finding rebukes decades of deficit thinking that treated African American Vernacular English as "broken" English on a slow path to correction. By calling out "important features", he signals that what’s diverging isn’t surface slang or fleeting style; it’s systematic grammar and sound patterns - the architecture of a dialect, not the decoration.

The subtext is that difference can be durable, even amplified, under pressure. In the post-civil-rights era often framed as integration’s triumph, Labov points to a linguistic reality shaped by segregation, neighborhood networks, media, identity, and the social costs of sounding "too standard". Divergence reads here less like isolation and more like social meaning: a community maintaining boundaries, signaling belonging, and innovating on its own terms.

Context matters: Labov’s broader project was to treat nonstandard dialects as rule-governed and expressive, not pathological. This line is a quiet warning against policies built on the fantasy that language - and by extension culture - will neatly converge if you just wait long enough.