The SAND database contains data of Dutch dialects. The data has been gathered between 2000 and 2005. SAND was carried out in five stages. The first stage involved research on the existing literature on Dutch dialects. Stages two to four comprised the actual data collection. Stage two (conducted in 2000) involved a pilot study in the form of a written questionnaire consisting of 393 test sentences. This was sent to informants of the Meertens Institute at 321 locations in the Netherlands and Belgium, with mostly one informant per location. At this stage social variables were not controlled for. The informants had to judge whether the test sentence was attested in their dialect, or were asked to translate or complete it. The aim of this pilot study was to get a first impression of the syntactic variation in the dialects of Dutch and of its distribution across the language area.

The second round of data collection (stage three, 2001-2002) consisted of oral interviews (involving elicited, not spontaneous speech) conducted at 267 locations spread across the Netherlands, Belgium and French Flanders. Each location was represented by at least two informants. These were mostly different informants from those used for the written questionnaire. The informants of the oral questionnaire had to meet the following criteria: both they themselves as well as their parents had to have been born and raised in the place of the interview; aged between 55 and 70 years; not highly educated; they should not have moved away from the place of interview for longer than 7 years, and they should be active users of the dialect in at least one social domain. In the Netherlands, to reduce accomodation, the actual oral interview was conducted between two dialect speakers (one of whom had earlier been instructed), while the fieldworker stood aside as much as possible. Due to the different sociolinguistic situation in Belgium, this option was not used there. Instead the fieldworker conducted the interviews him/herself, and the questions were posed in a sub-standard variety of Belgian Dutch (usually the regiolect). In total, 456 test sentences were asked in this round. Each interview lasted approximately 90 minutes. On average, every questionnaire contained about 100 sentences. Informants had to judge whether a test sentence was attested in their dialect, or were asked to translate or complete it. On the basis of the knowledge obtained in the first stage, a core of sentences was tested at every location, while some test sentences were only tested at a restricted number of locations, resulting in a regionalized oral questionnaire.

The third round of interviews (stage 4, 2003) was an inquiry by telephone conducted with informants from 246 locations who had taken part in the oral interviews. In total, 331 sentences were tested in this round. These were either sentences that had been tested in the oral interview but had not received a clear answer or new sentences that were required to get a more complete picture of some particular phenomenon.

The main focus of the SAND concerned the left periphery of the clause, pronominal reference, negation and quantification and the right periphery of the clause.

During stage 5 (2004-2005) the data collected in the previous three stages was transcribed, digitized and stored in a database, hosted by the Meertens Institute. In this last phase of SAND, a database was constructed (Dynasand, available at http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/sand/). The Dynasand makes it possible to conduct different kinds of searches within the database (as well as access the audio files). The dialect data in the Dynasand is enriched with PoS tags and is glossed with a word by word translation into English. It is possible to construct online maps that depict the geographical distribution of chosen linguistic variable(s).