Since 2018, I conduct elicitation of language data of various village dialects primarily within Germany via a short questionnaire. The aim of the project is to compile a corpus of systematic and comparable basic data of less well documented village dialects, especially in the very centre of Germany. Since these dialects are only spoken by an increasing minority of elders in their respective communities, the corpus can be an essential tool to give insights into the speech of the latest generations of native speakers and to investigate for various dialectological issues.

The village dialects contained in the corpus belong to the Low German, Central German, Low Franconian and North and East Frisian branches. The project is not limited by state-boundaries but originally focussed on central Germany and the region around southern Lower Saxony, North Hesse, eastern most North Rhine-Westphalia and bordering West Thuringia. It currently reaches as far as Northern and Southern Low Franconian (Limburgish) speaking areas as well as Central Franconian. Some village dialects in the corpus are found as far in the east as Żytkiemjy (formerly Szittkehmen in Ostpreußen) or Sylt. 

Speakers derive from the two last native generations. Whenever possible, translations of two or more speakers have been made, sometimes of different generations. Translations are collected as audio recordings and/or in written form.  Currently, the corpus contains about 300 different village dialects with data of more than 400 informants.