26 Dirk Geeraerts and Dirk Speelman
2.1. The material basis
We will investigate the instalment devoted to the human body of the Woor-
denboek van de Limburgse Dialecten, or WLD. The WLD is a large-scale
dictionary devoted to the Limburgish dialects as spoken in the Dutch prov-
ince of Limburg and the Belgian province of Limburg. The initiative for the
WLD was taken by Anton Weijnen of the university of Nijmegen in the
1960s. The first installment was published in 1983, and the dictionary is
currently being completed at the universities of Nijmegen and Leuven. (The
Leuven collaborator on the project, Ronny Keulen, has been an indispensa-
ble help to us in the preparation of this study, by making available the elec-
tronic database behind the dictionary and by guiding us through its design.)
The dictionary is organized thematically. In topical instalments like 'The
household: Food and drink' or 'Agrarian terminology: Grassland farming',
the traditional terminology of the dialects is described and charted - in a
fairly literal sense, to the extent that the geographical distribution of the
various terms is indicated by means of dialectological maps. The instalment
we are using is WLD III.1.1. 'The human being as an individual: The hu-
man body' (Keulen 2004). At present, the WLD is made available online
(http://www.ru.nl/dialect/wld/).
The materials included in the WLD come from many sources. The bulk
of the data was collected by means of questionnaires specifically designed
for the dictionary project, but these questionnaires were complemented
with material from older dialect surveys and sundry sources. However,
because we would like to base our study on maximally homogeneous ma-
terial in terms of age and geographical scope, we will only be using the
questionnaires N10, N106, N107, N108 and N109. All of these were ap-
plied fairly systematically over the entire geographical region covered by
the dictionary, in a fairly recent period (roughly, the last third of the pre-
vious century). This restriction means, for instance, that data culled from
research monographs devoted to a single local dialect, or data from larger
scale dialect surveys undertaken in the 1930s are not included in our analy-
sis.
We need to insist on the systematicity with which the data are collected,
because we would otherwise enhance the ambiguity of non-responses. If we
do not find any name at all for a given concept in a given place, that could
in principle have two reasons: either the question was never asked, or no
term was known to the informants (because the concept was unfamiliar, or
because there was a lexical gap in the dialect). The latter situation is one