In 1913 the „Systematic Questionnaires“ began to be circulated. All in all, until 1930 there had been 109 series sent out. Each questionnaire had a guiding theme. The questions addressed a certain primary word and its range of meanings, as well as compounds, comparisons, proverbs and customs related to the word in question. The usage examples were noted by the test persons on the slips of paper supplied. For the most part, the „collectors“ who answered these questions were elementary teachers who in turn questioned long-established residents. In the years from 1913 until 1915, 41 different questionnaires were sent to each of 350 collectors throughout Bavaria. Because of the war, surveys had to be curtailed in 1915. When the mailing of questionnaires was resumed after the First World War, the network of collectors never became that close-knit again. At the end there were only 38 collectors, two thirds of them from the Bavarian dialect area. The „Systematic Questionnaires“ survey resulted in 780,000 slips with examples of usage, and a further around 6,000 were lost at the end of the Second World War.

Starting in 1927 redactors went on exploratory tours throughout Bavaria. The material collected was called the “Field Exploration Catalogue“. It is the only material of the Bayerisches Wörterbuch noted down in face-to-face interviews. The main goal was to record exact pronunciations. Locations are concentrated especially in the Alpine region and the transitional zones to East Swabian and East Franconian. All in all, the Field Exploration Catalogue contains about 108,000 example slips.

During the 1920’s, the „Dialect Geography Questionnaire“ was created: Short and precise questions (on average 20-30 per questionnaire) were sent to a maximum number of informants. The goal was to install a pilot network for the rapid creation of dialect geography maps. The reason for this: The commission at that time flirted with the idea of developing a Linguistic Atlas of Bavaria.

All in all, 294 series of the questionnaire were sent out, as supplements of the „Wochenschrift zur Pflege von Heimat und Volkstum“. The magazine went as official post to all school administrators. The answers were written directly on the questionnaires. From the Bavarian dialect area, 250 questionnaires of each series were returned. All in all 80,000 questionnaires were returned. They have since been scanned for digital archiving. The result: around 1.3 million examples.