The database contains data collected during three rounds of interviews carried out within the VCN-project Syntactische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten (SAND; for an extensive description, see Barbiers, S., L. Cornips, J.P. Kunst (2006). The syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND): a corpus of elicited speech as an on-line Dynamic Atlas. In Beal, J.C., K.P. Corrigan and H. Moisl (eds.) Models and Methods in the Handling of Unconventional Digital Corpora. Volume 1: Synchronic corpora. Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan.

The SAND-research has mainly focused on variation in four empirical domains: the left periphery of the clause, pronominal reference, negation and quantification, the right periphery of the clause. The user will mainly, although not exclusively, find data on the following phenomena: complementizers, complementizer agreement, complementizer doubling, subject cliticization on yes/no, reflexives and reciprocals, question word doubling, relativization, topicalization, verbal agreement, verb clusters and cluster interruptions, finite verb positioning, morpho-syntax of non-finite verbs, negation, negation particles and negative concord.

The first round of interviews, a pilot study, was conducted in 2000. It comprised a written questionnaire consisting of 393 test sentences. These were put to informants of the Meertens Institute at 321 locations in the Netherlands an Belgium, with mostly one informant per location. With this group of informants, social variables were not controlled for. The informants had to judge whether the test sentence was attested in their dialect, or were asked to translate or complete it. The aim of this pilot study was to get an impression of the syntactic variation in the dialects of Dutch and of its distribution across the language area.

The second round of interviews was an oral questionnaire, conducted in 2001-2002 at 267 locations spread across the Netherlands, Belgium and French-Flanders, with at each location at least two informants. These were mostly different informants from those used for the written questionnaire. The informants of the oral questionnaire had to meet the following criteria: born and raised in the place of the interview, as well as their parents; no absence of longer than 7 years, aged between 55 and 70 years, not highly educated, active user of the dialect in at least one social domain. In the Netherlands, one dialect speaker was also the interviewer and the field worker stood aside as much as possible. In this way, the interview could hence be conducted entirely in the dialect, thereby reducing the chance of accommodation. In Belgium, the field worker was the interviewer. (S)he would pose the question to the informants in the regiolect. In total, 456 test sentences made up this round. The interviews lasted for approximately 90 minutes. On average, every questionnaire contained about 100 sentences. Informants had to judge whether a test sentence was attested in their dialect, or were asked to translate or complete it. There is a core of sentences that was tested at every location. Other test sentences were only tested at a restricted number of locations.

The third round of interviews was an inquiry by telephone conducted in 2003 with informants from the oral questionnaire at 246 locations. In total, 331 sentences were tested in this round. These were partly sentences that had also been tested in the oral interview but had not received a clear answer then. In addition, the telephone inquiry comprised a few new sentences that were required to get a more complete picture of some particular phenomena.

Please use the following reference: Barbiers, S. et al (2006). Dynamic Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch dialects (DynaSAND). Amsterdam, Meertens Institute. URL: https://sand.meertens.knaw.nl/.