Evaluation of sampling methods

The usefulness of the data derived from these 119 speakers will, of course, depend on their representativeness as a sample of the population of the different regions of upstate New York being studied. Even in this project’s best-sampled communities, seven to ten speakers still does not constitute an in-depth

sociolinguistic sample of a speech community. However, it is still possible to examine how reliable a picture of each community the sampling processes detailed above give us.

The issue of sample reliability can be evaluated on the small scale by consideration of the communities in which both telephone and in-person interviews were conducted—Amsterdam, Canton, Cooperstown, Gloversville, Ogdensburg, and Sidney. In each of these communities, the preliminary findings from two telephone interviews were sufficiently striking to prompt further research to attempt to confirm or disconfirm these first impressions. In four of those six communities, the first impressions from the telephone interviews were confirmed by the follow-up in-person research. As later chapters will

demonstrate, Gloversville was found to demonstrate a moderate degree of NCS; in Ogdensburg the NCS is in progress; in Amsterdam, there is no clear sign of the NCS; and in Canton the NCS is absent and the caught-cot merger well

underway; and in all of these communities, the two telephone-interview subjects give the same general impression of the status of the community as the larger sample does.

In Cooperstown and Sidney, however, the initial telephone interviews gave only a small and possibly misleading portion of the picture, which was substantially deepened by in-person research. The telephone interviews

suggested that Sidney was a highly advanced NCS community; however, none of the in-person interview subjects displayed NCS as advanced as the two telephone subjects, and many of them showed very weak or even absent NCS. Conversely, the initial telephone interviews in Cooperstown suggested a village that lacked the NCS entirely and was overall dissimilar to all the other

communities sampled in southeastern and central New York; but in-person interviews found NCS features in some speakers, and in others a general phonological profile that was overall in keeping with the region.

The difference between Sidney and Cooperstown on the one hand and Amsterdam, Canton, Gloversville, and Ogdensburg on the other hand lies in the accidental degree of difference or similarity between the two telephone-interview subjects. In Sidney and Cooperstown, the two initial telephone-interview subjects happened to be demographically very similar: in Sidney, both were middle-class women in their 50s who had completed some college; in Cooperstown, both were college-educated women in their 20s who were planning to start graduate school in the next few years. So coincidentally interviewing two speakers with similar demographic profiles in one community gave a misleading picture of a

community in which there is substantial variation between demographic groups—in these two villages in particular, between age groups. In each of Amsterdam, Canton, Gloversville, and Ogdensburg, however, the two telephone-interview subjects differed in age by at least 20 years, and in some

cases differed in socioeconomic class as well. (By coincidence, in all four

communities the two telephone-interview subjects are the same gender.) So we can have more confidence in the telephone interviews to present a reliable sketch of a community’s dialectological situation, especially in cases of potential change in progress, if the two speakers interviewed differ substantially in age and other demographic features.

There are seven communities in which only telephone interviews were conducted: Cobleskill, Fonda, Geneva, Lake Placid, Saratoga Springs,

Schenectady, and Walton. In all of these but Lake Placid and Schenectady, the two speakers analyzed differ by more than 25 years in age, as well as in gender, education, occupational class, or some combination of those factors. In

Schenectady, the two speakers (one female and one male) were born in 1929 and 1938, and are both retired from white-collar jobs. In Lake Placid, the two

speakers (likewise one male and one female) are both college students born in the 1980s. So the results presented in this dissertation for Lake Placid and Schenectady should probably be taken with a relatively large grain of salt, at least insofar as they might be taken as a sketch of the communities’

dialectological status. The data from Cobleskill, Fonda, Geneva, Saratoga Springs, and Walton, on the other hand, might be a bit more reliable as a first impression of the dialectological situation in those communities, inasmuch as they each have two data points from somewhat different demographics.

Similarly, the two speakers interviewed from Queensbury are both apparently lower-middle-class males born in 1989 and 1990, and so do not constitute a sample from which generalizations about the town of Queensbury

can be made. The three speakers from South Glens Falls range in year of birth from 1940 to 1983, and therefore are a somewhat more reliable rough sample of the village.

Table 2.4. Communities with seven or more speakers interviewed, by age and gender year of birth before 1943 1943–1957 1958–1972 1973– 1986 after 1986 mean y.o.b. female 1 3 Amsterdam male 2 1 1970 female 1 2 2 Canton male 1 1 2 1973 female 3 1 1 3 Cooperstown male 1 1967 female 1 1 Glens Falls male 1 1 2 1 1975 female 2 1 Gloversville male 2 1 1 2 1961 female 1 1 3 2 Ogdensburg male 1 1 1972 female 1 1 1 2 Oneonta male 1 1 1 1 1974 female 1 1 Plattsburgh male 1 1 1 2 1972 female 1 1 1 Poughkeepsie male 1 1 2 1966 female 2 1 2 Sidney male 1 1 1 1964 female 1 1 2 Utica male 2 1 1979 female 1 3 1 Watertown male 1 4 1972 total 9 18 20 24 27 1970

From each of the twelve communities in which in-person interviews were conducted, there are between seven and ten interviews analyzed. This allows us to get a clear enough snapshot of these communities for the purposes of

assigning them to dialect regions, but is not enough to get a detailed sociolinguistic picture of variation within each of these communities. The amount of sociolinguistic detail that can be extracted from each depends on the amount of demographic diversity within each community’s sample. Table 2.4 displays the ages and genders of the speakers interviewed in these twelve communities.

It is clear from Table 2.4 that the Short Sociolinguistic Encounter method, at least as practiced by me, skews the sample toward younger subjects. That means that when an overall mean value of any particular linguistic feature is computed for these communities, the value will tend to skew towards the value favored by younger speakers in cases of change in progress. The four

communities with the highest mean ages—Gloversville, Sidney, Poughkeepsie, and Cooperstown, with mean dates of birth in the 1960s—have the most even distribution of speakers across age groups, and thus in those the data mean will be less skewed away from the community mean.

Most of the communities sampled show a wide enough distribution of ages that, if language change is fairly active in any one community, it should be visible in apparent time. Utica is the main exception to this: the sample from Utica included six speakers born between 1979 and 1989 and one older outlier born in 1942, which is not sufficient to convincingly establish a long-term trend. In Watertown, all of the male subjects are older than all but one of the female subjects, which means that there is the potential for confusion between change in apparent time and stable gender-based variation. In Cooperstown, the only male

subject is also the oldest by a margin of 31 years; he may or may not be strictly comparable to the six female speakers younger than him as well.

There are few enough speakers sampled in any one community that it is unlikely that any gender-based variation within a single community can be isolated. However, males and females are both well-represented in the overall sample, and so once communities are grouped into regions it will become

possible to meaningfully compare male and female speakers within each region. The SSE method does not skew the gender makeup of the sample; of the 91 speakers interviewed in person, 47 are male and 44 are female. The telephone interview is skewed toward female speakers; the 28 telephone-interview subjects include 20 females and only eight males. However, the in-person interviews outnumber the telephone interviews by enough that the overall gender breakdown of the full sample, 64 females and 55 males, is still reasonably balanced. Oddly, among the oldest speakers the sample is skewed heavily toward males: among speakers born before 1943 there are eleven males (eight interviewed in person, three by telephone) and only four females (two in person, two telephone).

My attempt at supplementing SSEs with more in-depth, scheduled interviews in targeted communities must be regarded as a failure. My plan had been that, once I had identified communities of interest from my 2008 telephone interviews to target for in-person interviews, I would re-connect with those of my telephone-interview subjects who had expressed willingness to help with my further research, and ask for their assistance in contacting more speakers in their communities to schedule in-person interviews with. The communities I selected

for this approach were Sidney, Ogdensburg, and Canton.12 _{In Sidney the}

approach met with moderate success: my telephone-interview subjects in Sidney were able to put me in contact with three more natives of Sidney with whom I scheduled and conducted in-person interviews (as well as one speaker from the adjacent town of Masonville, unanalyzed in this dissertation). These three speakers, however, were not sufficient to bring my Sidney sample size to seven, and so it was necessary for me to conduct SSEs in Sidney in addition to the scheduled interviews. In Ogdensburg and Canton, it was a complete failure—I was not even able to reestablish contact with my telephone-interview subjects from those communities. In one case, when I dialed the number at which I had conducted one of my interviews in Ogdensburg and asked for my contact by the name she had given, the person who answered the telephone then didn’t even recognize the name. For this reason all of my in-person interviews in

Ogdensburg and Canton are SSEs, although I incorporated into them a few formal methods that I had intended to employ in longer scheduled interviews.