Meertens Institute
The Meertens Institute has a long history of collecting data of Dutch varieties including dialects, sociolects, regiolects, Dutch spoken in Suriname, Dutch creoles, and more recently, heritage Dutch. These (often very large) data corpora include the Phonological, Morphological and Syntactic Atlases of the Dutch dialects. We have expertise in methodological and practical aspects of collecting and storing (large amounts of) data. We have also developed several online interfaces to make these data available for a broader audience, including websites that are easily searchable and contain tools to extract and visualize the data. The variational linguists at the Meertens Institute approach dialect variation from a variety of perspectives. We analyze these data from a combination of phonological, morphological and syntactic formal linguistic approaches, sociolinguistic approaches and computational approaches.