The Meertens Institute, established in 1926, has been a research institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) since 1952. We study the diversity in language and culture in the Netherlands. Our focus is on contemporary research into factors that play a role in determining social identities in the Dutch society.

Our main fields are:

1. ethnological study of the function, meaning and coherence of cultural expressions
2. structural, dialectological and sociolinguistic study of language variation within Dutch in the Netherlands, with the emphasis on grammatical and onomastic variation.

The results of our research are presented in a number of publications.

The institute also publishes its own books. We also organize workshops, symposiums and conferences on a regular basis.

Apart from research, the institute also concerns itself with documentation and providing information to third parties in the field of Dutch language and culture. We possess a large library, with numerous collections and a substantive documentation system, of which databases are a substantive part.

The Meertens Institute currently employs appr. 60 people