Abstract
The so-called 'Franconian' dialects of the borderland of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg share an interesting phonological feature: they have a lexical tone contrast, i.e. a word can mean different things depending on which of the two tones it contains. Many aspects of these dialects are not very well understood, particularly regarding the interaction between tone and segmental structure. The current proposal contains three closely related projects in which an attempt is made to solve the numerous problems of Franconian tonology and to integrate Franconian into the typology of tone languages. In these projects insights of modern phonology and phonetics are put to work and combined with the techniques of classical dialectology.