Adding in the communities with small samples

The discussion above took into account only the twelve communities in which seven or more speakers were sampled; this constitutes 98 speakers out of the full sample of 119. The remaining 21 speakers are from a total of eleven different communities. Now that the general patterns of dialect diversity in Upstate New York have been established in the foregoing sections, this section

27 _{The following chapters will discuss a dialect division within the Hudson Valley region: the}

communities closest to the Hudson itself, specifically Poughkeepsie and Albany, exhibit some influence from New York City in both their /æ/ system and their raised /oh/. Amsterdam and Oneonta, however, do not exhibit these features and therefore resemble southwestern New England proper more closely than Poughkeepsie and Albany do, despite being more distant from

will attempt to classify these eleven communities, based on the limited data available for them, in terms of the features used to classify the communities with deeper samples. The locations of these communities are shown in Map 3.25; Table 3.26 lists the EQ1 indices and NCS scores of the speakers interviewed in each of them.

Map 3.25. The locations of communities with one to three speakers sampled, whose dialectological status is to be determined.

Some of these communities are easier to assign to dialectological groups than others, on the basis of geography and the data in Table 3.26. In Geneva, which is west of Syracuse and geographically well within the core Inland North region, both speakers interviewed have NCS scores of four and EQ1 indices close to zero; we can describe Geneva with no qualms as a core Inland North

community. Similarly, on the other end of the spectrum, Lake Placid is in

Adirondack Park in the northeastern part of New York, closer to Plattsburgh and Canton than to any other communities sampled in this dissertation; both

speakers there score zero and have EQ1 indices below –100, making them a good linguistic fit as well with the “Northwestern New England” region that includes Plattsburgh and Canton.

Table 3.26. NCS scores and EQ1 indices for speakers in communities with small samples

community n scores EQ1

Cobleskill 2 2, 2 –108, –37 Fonda 2 2, 2 –68, –33 Geneva 2 4, 4 –10, –13 Lake Placid 2 0, 0 –185, –103 Morrisonville 1 1 –139 Queensbury 2 2, 2 –130, –86 Saratoga Springs 2 2, 2 –34, –116 Schenectady 2 3, 2 –119, –95 South Glens Falls 3 2, 2, 4 –84, –144, –60

Walton 2 2, 4 –90, –49

Yorkville 1 3 –66

Two communities have only one speaker in the sample—Morrisonville and Yorkville. These are speakers who at first described themselves as natives of Plattsburgh and Utica, respectively, but then after the interview had already begun clarified that they actually lived in smaller communities outside those cities. Kerri B., from Morrisonville, is easy to group linguistically with

Plattsburgh with her low score and EQ1 index. James C. from Yorkville is

somewhat harder to group with Utica, since his score of three and his EQ1 index of –66 are both very much on the low side for the Inland North core—only seven Inland North speakers in the Telsur corpus (none in Upstate New York), and none of the current sample of Utica or Geneva, have EQ1 indices below –50. Two

of the seven Utica speakers in the sample score three, so James is in moderately good company there, at least. Despite his low EQ1 index, James (and therefore Yorkville) will be considered to be part of the Inland North core because his NCS score is at least within the range of Utica’s scores, and because Yorkville is not only directly adjacent to Utica but also on Utica’s west side (i.e., in the direction of the rest of the Inland North core, not in the direction of the fringe and the Hudson Valley), so there is no other candidate region to assign the village to. James C. is also older than any of the speakers in the sample from Utica proper (he was born in 1931, whereas Janet B. was born in 1942 and all other

interviewed Utica speakers are 1979 or later) and male, which might merely indicate that he represents a less advanced form of the NCS; but with Janet B. being the most advanced NCS speaker in the sample and no other source of apparent-time data on Utica, this must remain conjecture.

The other seven communities in Table 3.26 are harder to categorize. As Map 3.25 shows, most of them are more or less between the Inland North fringe and Hudson Valley regions established in the previous sections and displayed on Map 3.21; and their scores and EQ1 indices are generally mixed, intermediate, or inconsistent. Schenectady is the easiest to classify; it is between Amsterdam and Albany, both Hudson Valley cities, and both speakers have very low EQ1 indices. Even though one’s NCS score is three, which is high for the Hudson Valley, scores of three are found in both Poughkeepsie and Oneonta as well. So Schenectady can be classified as a Hudson Valley community.

Cobleskill, Fonda, Saratoga Springs, and Walton are somewhat more confusing. The scores of the speakers in Walton are two and four; this suggests

that the village should be included in the Inland North fringe, which was first defined as a set of communities whose scores were mostly between two and four. However, their NCS scores are quite low for an Inland North fringe community, and seem more typical of Oneonta than of any of the four fringe cities established so far; Daniel H., a 23-year-old Air Force serviceman with an EQ1 index of –90, would have the lowest EQ1 index in the Inland North fringe sample if Walton were included in the fringe.

Cobleskill, Fonda, and Saratoga Springs are the opposite of Walton in this respect. All the speakers sampled in these communities score two; by the

methodology employed earlier in this chapter, on the basis of that score these three communities would be assigned to the Hudson Valley with Oneonta and Amsterdam. However, in each of these three communities one speaker has an EQ1 index around –35, higher than that of any speaker in the Hudson Valley communities discussed above.28

In Cobleskill and Saratoga Springs, the second speaker’s EQ1 index is below –100, deep within the Hudson Valley range; in Fonda, the second speaker’s EQ1 index is –68, within the area of overlap between the high EQ1 indices of the Hudson Valley and the low EQ1 indices of the Inland North fringe.

It is noteworthy but not astonishing that these four communities seem hard to classify, mixed, or intermediate between the Inland North fringe and the Hudson Valley in terms of their scores and EQ1 indices—to begin with, as noted above, they are all geographically intermediate between the Inland North fringe

28 _{Not much higher: the highest EQ1 index in Oneonta is –39, and these communities’ EQ1 indices}

communities and Hudson Valley communities determined earlier in this chapter. Moreover, Cobleskill, Fonda, and Walton are villages. From the observation above that the villages of Cooperstown and Sidney (both also along the general boundary between Inland North fringe and Hudson Valley) are losing the NCS in apparent time, it was hypothesized that villages near this boundary might be less stable in their dialectological status than cities in the same area. That

hypothesis would predict that other villages along that boundary might show inconsistent or intermediate behavior with respect to NCS features—and so they do. In fact, in all three of the villages, it is the older of the two speakers sampled who exhibits more NCS-like features (i.e., the higher EQ1 index, and in Walton the higher score); this is consistent with the same retreat from the NCS that Sidney shows. Similarly, Novak (2004) found NCS features diminishing in apparent time in Ballston Spa, a village just outside Saratoga Springs.

Unlike Cobleskill, Fonda, and Walton (and Ballston Spa), Saratoga Springs is a city, and here it is the younger speaker who shows the higher EQ1 index. So Saratoga Springs’ dialectological status seems to be hard to define based on the data available; two speakers is certainly not enough to establish an apparent-time trend toward the NCS without a suggestion of a similar result from better-

sampled comparable communities. Saratoga Springs is also by far the fastest- growing city in the state, having seen a 31.5% increase in population from 1970 to 2000 while the other eleven cities sampled in this dissertation saw on average a 17.4% decline29

, and the five Upstate cities in the Telsur corpus declined by an average of 26.3%; it is the only city it the state to have increased in population

every decade since 1950 (Population Trends 2004). Saratoga Springs’ atypical demographic status makes it hard to predict what dialectological status it might be expected to have.

The two communities adjacent to Glens Falls—the town of Queensbury, which borders it on the north, and the village of South Glens Falls, which borders it on the south—are similarly problematic. South Glens Falls resembles Walton, in that its NCS scores range up to four but its EQ1 indices are all less than –50; and like Walton and the other villages, it is the oldest speaker interviewed from South Glens Falls who has the highest EQ1 index and score. If Queensbury were not immediately adjacent to an Inland North fringe city, it would seem to be very clearly a non–Inland North community; both speakers have EQ1 indices less than –85 and NCS scores of two. It is possible for there to be dialect boundaries within individual communities or between closely related communities, especially when they have separate elementary schools30

; but the sharply reduced presence of NCS features in these communities, which one might have expected to be in the same speech community as Glens Falls, is nevertheless troubling.

It was hypothesized above that Sidney is retreating from the NCS under the influence of the nearby non-NCS city of Oneonta; but the city with the greatest linguistic influence on South Glens Falls must surely be Glens Falls. Queensbury and Glens Falls were originally a single town; Glens Falls only became a separate city in 1908. The difference between Glens Falls and the adjacent communities here may be an effect of community size and population

30 _{Johnson (2007)’s discovery that half of the city of Attleboro, Mass., is in the Rhode Island dialect}

density, if we interpret Inland North fringe cities to be those to which the NCS diffused at a later date from the Inland North core. The cascade model predicts at least that, all else being equal, a linguistic change undergoing diffusion will reach larger communities before smaller communities; and Glens Falls on the one hand and South Glens Falls on the other may well be regarded as a case where all else is equal if there ever was one.31 _{However, this explanation doesn’t account for}

why it is the older speaker in South Glens Falls who has the most NCS-like features. A solid explanation for the difference between Glens Falls and the communities adjacent to it may have to wait until more data is available from this area.

For the sake of having every community in a category when communities are grouped for dialectological analysis in later chapters, I will use the NCS scores of each of these intermediate-seeming or confusing communities to

classify them. Thus Walton and South Glens Falls, whose scores range up to four, will be considered Inland North fringe communities, while Saratoga Springs, Fonda, and Cobleskill will be considered Hudson Valley communities (although with the caveats detailed above). Queensbury is not included as an Inland North fringe community by this criterion, but it will not be considered part of the Hudson Valley either because it is north of Glens Falls; Queensbury will be included only when “miscellaneous communities” are grouped. Map 3.27 shows the full set of dialectological assignments and isoglosses.

31 _{Queensbury is strictly speaking not a “smaller community” than Glens Falls, since it has a}

larger population; however, cities and towns in New York State are not strictly comparable to each other in this respect. Queensbury has a larger population, but it is much less urbanized than Glens Falls and has approximately one tenth Glens Falls’ population density.

Map 3.27. The dialect regions of Upstate New York, as determined in this chapter.