In our study we make an attempt to measure the level of complexity of different varieties, dialects, and macro-dialects of South Slavic continuum. The goal is to examine the complexity variance throughout the South Slavic territory and to explain if and how complexity levels correlate with the involvement or non-involvement of the different dialects in past and present language contact situations.
The overall data sample consists of 919 observations, each of them representing a single South Slavic variety spoken in one location. The data comprises 17 macro-dialect groups and 78 dialects pertaining to Bulgarian-Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian parts of the South Slavic dialect continuum.