William Labov's Martha's vineyard study 1961 Carried out in 1961
-Martha’s Vineyard
-Labov focused his studies on dialectology in Martha’s vineyard, an island which is isolated from Massachusetts. It is a popular tourist area.
-He was interested mainly in the pronunciation of the diphthongs /au/ and /ai/.
-He interviewed 69 people from different social groups, ages, occupations and ethnicities
-He asked them specific questions which encouraged them to use words that contained these diphthongs/vowels
-Linked to the idea of group identity, he found that native groups, such as the fishermen and the up-islanders, they pronounced the diphthong /əu/ and /əi/ and this area was less popular to tourists
-Labov concluded that this was done subconsciously to establish an identity of themselves as Vineyarders, to create a distance between them and the tourists