Professor Sibata’s haha and other sociolinguistic insights

Takesi Sibata, the pioneer of sociolinguistic dialectology, anticipated several developments that we now apply internationally in the discipline of sociolinguistics. I outline Professor Sibata’s accomplishments from a Western perspective, but I am mainly interested in promoting wider appreciation of his work in the study of language variation. To do that, I review some of his analyses and show how Professor Sibata developed concepts that persist in contemporary sociolinguistics. I show that, for instance, about fifteen years before the inception of Western sociolinguistics, Professor Sibata was already engaged in studying sound change in apparent time, identifying linguistic innovators, eliciting folk concepts about dialects, and seeking empirical evidence for the critical period in dialect acquisition, as well as other pursuits that are now integral to our discipline.