Politics & Power Quote by William Labov

Casually tossed off as a timeline, Labov's line is really a quiet rebuke to intellectual amnesia. "Well" does a lot of work: it's the sound of a scholar meeting a roomful of assumptions with patient disbelief. The phrase "have been studied" invokes institutional legitimacy, but also implies that the legitimacy keeps getting ignored. Labov isn't marveling at a century of research so much as signaling that the basic facts are already in the archive: dialect difference is systematic, describable, and not a symptom of laziness or decay.

The kicker is "for a hundred years or so". That "or so" is anti-heroic, almost dismissive of anniversaries. It undercuts any attempt to treat dialect study as a trendy new sensitivity project. In the culture wars framing of language - where "proper English" gets conscripted as a proxy for class, race, region, and belonging - Labov is reminding you that linguistics has receipts. The science has been there; what's been missing is public uptake.

Context matters because Labov is the central architect of modern sociolinguistics, the person who made accents legible as social history rather than personal failure. Read that way, the sentence is a strategic throat-clear before the real argument: if we've been studying dialects for a century, then the persistence of dialect prejudice isn't ignorance, it's ideology. The line works by sounding modest while quietly shifting the burden of proof back onto the people who keep acting surprised that "nonstandard" speech has rules.