The database contains about 5 Million dialectal linguistic evidences collected in differend projects within the Free State of Bavaria to the dialects Bavarian, Frankish, and Swabian.
In 1984, linguists at the University of Augsburg began to collect dialect data for the research and documentation project "Linguistic Map of Swabia" (German: "Sprachatlas von Bayerisch-Schwaben (SBS)"). In 1986, the University of Bayreuth followed with preparations for the "Linguistic Map of North- and East-Bavaria" (German: "Sprachatlas von Nordostbayern (SNOB)"). In the following years, partner projects of the other regions also started to collect data in their particular region. All six language projects then formed the "Research Association of the Bavarian Linguistic Map " (German: Bayerischer Sprachatlas (BSA)"), which was funded by the DFG and the Bavarian State Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts.
The first digital publication of BayDat by Ralf Zimmermann in 2007 at the University of Würzburg (see linked paper) was re-designed in 2019 by Manuel Raaf at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
For detailed information, please see https://baydat.badw.de/info
The database currently contains about 1 million dialectal linguistic evidences of the project "The Franconian Dictionary" (German: Das Fränkische Wörterbuch), each of which lemmatized, annotated, and linked to the original questionnaire. The database is work in progress, so there will be more data available regularly.
The Franconian Dictionary was initiated by the Munich office of the Bavarian Dictionary project, sending questionnaires for a dialect survey in Franconia. In the wake of this survey an office in Erlangen was established in 1933 (see link below for more information).
During the course of 90 years thousands of volunteers helped to compile a considerable collection of vernacular examples of usage, drawn from the Bavarian districts of Upper, Middle and Lower Frankonia. For the most part they represent the East Franconian dialect, to the lesser extent also Rhine-Franconian, Swabian and North-Bavarian vernaculars. Between 2007 and 2008 a small selection of the research results was published in three editions of one printed volume by Eberhard Wagner and Alfred Klepsch: “Handwörterbuch von Bayerisch-Franken” (see link below for more information).
Since 2012 the Franconian Dictionary, a project of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, has been entrusted to the Friedrich-Alexander-University in Erlangen and Nuremberg (FAU). The project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Mechthild Habermann, Chair of the Faculty of German Linguistics at the FAU.
For detailed information, please see http://www.wbf.badw.de/en/the-project.html and http://www.wbf.badw.de/en/wbf-digital.html