Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry Digital Archive User Guide: Interviewee (Location) Data

This is a guide to using the Digital Archive to the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (dlc.library.columbia.edu/lcaaj)

Interviewees (Locations)

INTERVIEWEES (LOCATIONS)

Approximately 640 individuals were interviewed for this project.  They were chosen in such a way as to provide a grid for mapping Yiddish across Europe, with representatives of Yiddish-speaking communities or of communities where the survival of West Yiddish in local German speech was still strong .  Each interviewee (and their interview) is identified by a five-digit number, the first four representing the basic latitude and longitude of his or her community location, and the fifth number indicating the part of a nine-part grid in the square created by those two geographic points into which that community fell.

The links below provide access to a full list of the participants arranged both by ID number and by official place name. In those lists, one finds each interview, and sometimes additional interviews administered to the same individuals or additional individuals.  Those interviews can be identified by a letter appended to the five-number ID (e.g., 49275A).

A third link below provides a list of interviewees grouped by LCAAJ region (and in two cases, regions added by our project team).  The project leaders grouped most of these respondents into broad areas for which variant forms of the questionnaire were designed, on the assumption that particular questions might or might not be meaningful to speakers from those areas.  The names correspond generally to some country and regional names, but are usually broader than the areas covered by those country or regional names. Moving roughly from west to east and north to south, they are: Alsace; Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Holland; Northern Poland; Western Galicia; Transcarpathia; Courland; Lithuania; Northern Belarus; Eastern Galicia; Northern Ukraine; Southern Ukraine and Romania; Bulgaria; and Israel.

The fourth link provides a listing of interviewees by the printout series.  A portion of the data from some answer sheets were entered into a computer program in the late 1960s and 1970s and then printed out in listings arranged by question number.  Researchers wanting to assemble the list of answes to any given question will want to start with these printouts, before proceeding to the answer sheets for the informants not included in one of these.  This list, arranged by series -- Black Binder, Blue Dot, Red Dot, and Yellow Dot -- identifies which informants are contained in which list.  Except for four or five instances, individual interviewees are found in only printout.  At the end of list is the large group of interviewees not found in any printout, for which the answer sheets (or even, conceivably, the Blue Books) must be the primary source of information.