Research and documentation of language and culture in the Netherlands

Research groups

The study of language and culture is central to the research at the Meertens Institute. Language is the main focus of the research group Linguistics and Language Variation, whereas the study of culture is mostly concentrated within the Ethnology and Oral Culture research group. In addition, a substantive part of the research takes place within the context of the overarching KNAW Humanities Cluster. Under this umbrella, two interdisciplinary, crossinstitutional research labs were founded: NL-Lab and DHLab.

Ethnology and Oral Culture

The Meertens Institute’s Ethnology and Oral Culture research group carries out research on social and cultural phenomena, both in the Netherlands and in ‘the world’ related to the Netherlands. Central to the group’s research is the ever-changing plural society.

Linguistics and Language Variation

The Linguistics and Language Variation research group studies language, language variation, and language change in the Netherlands, as well as Dutch languages around the world. Central to the research is the complex interaction between language (and language variation and change), identity, culture and diversity, against the background of social change.

DHLab

DHLab is a laboratory environment for all digital humanities research within the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). DHLab’s mission is to advance humanities research by pooling expertise from the fields of humanities, computational linguistics, information retrieval, XML, social sciences and the Semantic Web....

NL-Lab

NL-Lab is a research group of the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and was founded by the Meertens Institute and Huygens Institute in 2019. NL-Lab develops research on the subject of Dutch culture and identity past and present. How is national identity created...