De bijdrage van Weijnen aan de Nederlandse dialectologie

This paper discusses Weijnen’s most important and most representative contributions to Dutch dialectology. Weijnen’s scientific work is marked by combining an overall synthetic motivation and a stringently analytical approach. This combination resulted in both stratigraphic studies of the dialect lexicon and innovative insights in the classification of the Dutch dialects. Weijnen succeeded in uniting bundles of isoglosses resulting from geographical studies on words and sounds and subjective, perception based ratings of dialect speakers on linguistics distances between dialects. His work is strikingly consistent, from his dissertation onwards (1937), along his opus magnum, Nederlandse Dialectkunde (1958 en 1966), and up to and including his 1999 study on the old lexical layers in the south-central dialects.