Kleiner Niederländischer Sprachatlas (KNSA)

The present contribution aims to present the Kleiner Niederländischer Sprachatlas unter Einschluss des Westfriesischen (KNSA, ‘Concise Linguistic Atlas of Dutch including West Frisian’). With the Belgian and Dutch Wenker sentences as its source of data, the KNSA represents a westward expansion of its model and predecessor atlas, the Kleiner Deutscher Sprachatlas (KDSA, ‘Concise Linguistic Atlas of German’), which charted historical data from Georg Wenker’s survey of the former German Empire at the end of the 19th century. Less well known is the collection of Wenker sentences that was carried out in the Dutch language area beginning during the First World War, then in the 1920s, and in the 1930s. The KNSA systematically charts these historical Dutch and West Frisian data, and allows for their comparison to the German Wenker data. Although initiated in the 1990s, the project could only be completed in 2017. The KNSA was published on the internet research platform Regionalsprache.de (REDE). This contribution will first present the atlas’ data basis, then explain the relationship of the KNSA to the KDSA, and discuss the former’s publication. Finally, a brief case study analysis of h-dropping in Dutch dialects will conclude the contribution to demonstrate one possibility for further research with the atlas.