Overall, the communities selected for study were chosen with the aim of estimating the locations of dialect boundaries as closely as possible using the best information that was available at each phase of research. Although in succeeding chapters of this dissertation data from all communities sampled will be
presented together, as if all communities had been sampled and analyzed
simultaneously, in actuality the research proceeded in stages, with the data from the speakers interviewed at each stage having being fully or partially analyzed before the selection of communities for the next stage began. Thus the selection of communities sampled later depended in some respects on the dialectological status of the communities sampled earlier. This means that the process of the selection of communities discussed in this section will necessarily make reference in some places to the dialectological findings discussed in later chapters of this dissertation.
The research project that led to this dissertation began as a pilot study of the eastward extent of the NCS and the location of the boundary between
ANAE's Inland North and Western New England regions. The westernmost city assigned to the Western New England region is Albany, and the easternmost
cities assigned to the Inland North are Syracuse and Binghamton.2 The first city
selected for in-person interviews in this project, therefore, was Utica: the most populous city between the Albany metropolitan area3 and those two Inland
North cities. Albany, Utica, and Syracuse all lie along Interstate 90, the east-west leg of the New York State Thruway; Utica is approximately 100 miles west of Albany and 50 miles east of Syracuse. Interviews were conducted in Utica in the summer of 2006.
Utica was found to be part of the Inland North, and so the next phase of the pilot study narrowed in on the gap between Utica and Albany. Telephone interviews were conducted later in the summer of 2006 in the three largest cities between Albany and Utica: Schenectady, Amsterdam, and Gloversville.
Schenectady and Amsterdam are both located along the New York State
Thruway, Schenectady approximately 15 miles west of Albany and Amsterdam about 20 miles west of Schenectady. Gloversville is not directly on the Thruway but rather some eight miles north of it; it is about 15 road miles northwest of Amsterdam and 60 miles east of Utica. The telephone interviews suggested that Amsterdam and Gloversville were on opposite sides of a dialect boundary, and so in-person interviews were carried out in these two cities in the summer of 2007.
The next set of cities sampled was selected mostly according to the same rationale by which Utica was selected: medium-sized cities approximately
midway between two cities assigned by ANAE to different dialect regions. These
2 For the locations of these cities, see Map 1 below.
3 The most populous city west of Albany proper and east of Syracuse and Binghamton is Schenectady, which was slightly larger than Utica as of the 2000 United States Census. Schenectady, however, is within the Albany metropolitan area, and Utica was selected as being more likely to be an informative data point.
included Oneonta, between Binghamton and Albany; Watertown, between Syracuse and Ottawa, Ontario; Poughkeepsie, between Albany and New York City; and Glens Falls, between Albany and Rutland, Vermont. Plattsburgh, which is separated from most of the rest of New York State by the vast Adirondack State Park, and is closer to Burlington, Vermont, and Montreal, Quebec, than to any other cities in New York, was added to increase the
geographic spread of the sampled cities. In-person interviews were conducted in these five cities in the summer of 2007. Map 2.1 shows the locations of all the communities sampled up to this point in the project.
Map 2.1. Communities sampled in the Telsur project, and in 2006 and 2007 for this dissertation. The large light green area on this and other maps represents Adirondack State Park.
In the late winter and spring of 2008, telephone interviews were conducted in several cities and villages4
along a rough line that the work up to that point suggested might approximate the southeastern border of the Inland North, many bridging gaps between cities sampled in earlier phases of research:
• Cobleskill, between Oneonta and Schenectady • Cooperstown, roughly between Oneonta and Utica
• Fonda, on the Thruway, south of Gloversville and west of Amsterdam • Saratoga Springs, between Albany and Glens Falls
• Sidney, between Oneonta and Binghamton • Walton, south of Oneonta
Also sampled in this phase were communities in northern New York, bridging the gap between Watertown and Plattsburgh: Ogdensburg, Canton, and Lake Placid. (Lake Placid is the only community sampled in this study that lies within Adirondack Park.) Telephone interviews were also conducted in Geneva, a city midway between Syracuse and Rochester, in order to provide at least some data from a medium-sized city well within the boundaries of the Inland North region, for the sake of comparability with cities (like Gloversville) of similar size but near the edge of the Inland North. Communities sampled during this phase are
shown on Map 2.2.
In the summer of 2008, in-person interviews were conducted in four of the communities sampled by telephone in the preceding phase: Ogdensburg and
4 “Cities” and “villages” are two distinct types of general-purpose municipal governments under New York law. The chief difference is that villages remain subject to the jurisdiction of the surrounding town and cities do not. Cities are also usually, though not necessarily, larger in population than villages. The town is the third type of sub-county local government; towns are weak governmental entities into which all of the county land outside cities is subdivided.
Canton, selected because (like Gloversville and Amsterdam), they appeared to be on opposite sides of a dialect boundary despite being less than 20 miles apart; Sidney, selected because it appeared to be on the opposite side of a dialect boundary from Oneonta, only 25 miles away; and Cooperstown, because it appeared to be dialectologically dissimilar to all of the other nearby communities sampled. Some additional interviews were also conducted in Oneonta at this time, although these are for the most part not analyzed in the dissertation. Finally, in the autumn of 2008, additional telephone interviews were conducted in Cooperstown in order to increase the size of the sample.
2.3. Interview methodology