External projects
A considerable portion of our research is organized in research projects that are executed in collaboration with external partners and that are financed externally. Below you will find a list of such projects. This list contains those projects whose terms extend until after 2006. 
COgnition, Acquisition and VAriation Tool (COAVA)
Coordinator: prof. dr. L. Cornips
Project Team: ir. M. Kemps-Snijders (Meertens), ing. Martin Snijders (Meertens), prof. dr. J. Swanenberg (Universiteit van Tilburg), drs. F. de Vriend (Meertens), dr. W. Heeringa (Meertens).
Financing: CLARIN
Term: 2011-2012
More information
Early successive bilingualism: Bilingual first language acquisition or child second language acquisition?
Coordinators: Dr L. Cornips, Dr S. Unsworth (Meertens/Utrecht),  Prof. A.C.J. Hulk (UvA), in cooperation with Prof. A. Sorace (Edinburgh), Dr E. Argyri (Edinburgh) en Prof. I. Tsimpli (Thessaloniki).
Financing: NWO Language Acquisition & Multilingualism program
Term: 2008-2010
Brief description:
Increasing migration means that more and more children are coming into contact with a second language at an early age. This project, which is in being carried out in combination with Unsworth’s VENI project (2008-2012), investigates whether it makes a difference how old you are when you start acquiring a second language as a child and how much contact with that language is necessary. Three groups of English/Dutch bilinguals are being investigated, namely (i) children who acquire two languages from birth, (ii) children who start acquiring another language after birth but before age 4, and (iii) children who start acquiring their second language after age 5. The project examines the acquisition of grammatical gender and word order. More information
European Dialect Syntax (Edisyn)
Coordinator: Prof. S. Barbiers
Research participants: MA E. Boef (oio), Dr M. Lekakou (post-doc), F. Wesseling (research assistant), J.P. Kunst MA (technical development)
Financing: ESF / EURYI (=European Science Foundation/European Young Investigators)
Term: 2005-2010
Brief description:
This project has a threefold goal: (i) documentation and analysis of syntactic doubling phenomena in European dialects; (ii) the construction of a European network of dialect syntacticians and (iii) the standardization of methodology, storage and retrieval of syntactic data.
From dialect to regiolect: how this change is reflected in the production and perception of the speakers.
Coordinator: Prof. F.L.M.P. Hinskens
Research participant: Dr W.J. Heeringa
Term: 2007-2011
Brief description:
For about 80 representative dialect varieties dialect change in apparent time (i.e. differences in dialect use between speakers of different age groups) is studied on the basis of transcriptions and on the basis of a web-based perception experiment. Questions to be answered are: do dialects converge to each other and to standard Dutch? Do small dialect areas fuse into larger regiolect areas? Which linguistic level is especially affected: the lexical, morphological or sound components level? We subdivide the latter level in a lexical phonological, postlexical and purely phonetic level. Finally, we want to find out whether perception lags production, or the opposite.
The Roots of Ethnolects
Coordinators: Prof. F. Hinskens, Prof. P. Muysken (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Research participants: A. van Wijngaarden MA (research trainee Meertens Institute), E. van Krieken MA (assistant research fellow Radboud University Nijmegen)
Financing: NWO program
Term: 2005-2010
Brief description:
Apart from East-Indian Dutch and Surinamese Dutch, there are many more new ethnically coloured varieties (or ethnolects) of the Dutch language at the present day. This project focuses on the exposure of the roots of these ethnolects. Do ethnolects draw on local city dialects or are they completely separated from these? Can we retrieve the traces of the second language acquisition processes of the first generation in ethnolects? Do they display elements from the original mother tongue of the ethnic group, and if so, which elements are these? How does a young person become introduced into the ethnolect? More information
Tone and Intrasegmental Structure in West Germanic Dialects
Coordinators: Dr B. Hermans, Dr M. van Oostendorp, Prof. P. Boersma (UVA), Dr N. Smith (UVA)
Research participants: B. Köhnlein MA (assistant research fellow), M. Prehn MA (assistant research fellow), Dr W. Kehrein (post-doc UVA)
Financing: NWO program
Term: 2005-2009
Brief description:
The ‘Franconian’ dialects in the border region of the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Luxemburg have an interesting phonological characteristic: they have a lexical tone contrast, or, in other words, the meaning of words can be dependent on tone. The relationship between tone and segment structure has not been explored sufficiently either. This program deals with the execution of three related research projects involving Franconian tonology. In these projects, an attempt is being made to integrate these dialects into a typology of tonal languages.
Update Corpus van Reenen-Mulder 14th century Middle Dutch (CRM)
Coordinator: prof. dr. P. Th. van Reenen, dr . M. Rem
Research participants: drs. C. De Wulf, dr. H. van Halteren
Term: 2009-2010
Brief description:
The CRM consists of 14th century charters in Middle Dutch. The charters are dated, localised, lemmatised and morphologically tagged. In 2003 it consisted of almost 3000 charters, see Rem 2003. The aim of the project is to  expand and correct the corpus. The expansion concerns (a) charters from Brussels Sint Goedele, collected by M. Rem (partly in collaboration with E. Kwakkel) and (b) charters from West- and Oost-Vlaanderen, collected by C. De Wulf (partly in collaboration with M. Rem. Corrections of the existing tags are carried out by means of software developed by H. van Halteren.
Variation in Inflection (Variflex)
Coordinators: Prof. H.J. Bennis & Prof. F. Weerman (UVA=Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Research participants: A. Maclean MA (assistant research fellow), Dr E. Blom (post-doc UVA), D. Polisenska MA (assistant research fellow UVA)
Financing: NWO program (NWO=Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research)
Term: 2003-2009 (two dissertations to appear in 2009/2010)
Brief description: Research into the morpho-syntactic variation that can be found in verbal and adjectival flection in Dutch. This includes the comparison of several dimensions of linguistic variation, to wit geographical variation, diachronic variation, variation in first language acquisition and second language acquisition.