Heeringa, Dr Ing W.J. (Wilbert)

Areas of expertise

Dialectometry, phonetics, statistics.

Biography

Programmer and data scientist Wilbert Heeringa (Groningen, 1970) received his engineering degree in 1993 and his master's degree in 1997. In 2004, he obtained his PhD with the thesis Measuring Dialect Pronunciation Differences using Levenshtein Distance, from the University of Groningen. From 2007 to 2011, he worked at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam. He visited 86 villages in the Netherlands and Flanders, recording local dialects as spoken by older men and younger women. Comparing the dialect use of these two categories, he measured dialect change over apparent time with attention to vocabulary, morphology and sound components.

Heeringa was involved in a project at the University of Oldenburg investigating sound variation in Sater Frisian across villages and generations. He was also affilited to the Thomas More University College in Antwerp and developed a training system for pronunciation of sounds.