The project investigates the effect of language contact on the structural make up of clitics through the analysis of their use and function in three South Slavic contact varieties: Molise Croatian (MC), Burgenland Croatian (BC) and Torlak (TK). Although clitics have been extensively examined in standard(-ized) Slavic languages, very little attention has been paid to marginalized and/or endangered varieties. 

Besides the language preservation and documentation effect, the study aims to provide an insight in the layering of complexity in the syntactic structure of clitics by examining their inventories, the structural layers truncated in the simplification triggered by contact as well as those interacting with the structures of the other contact variety, specifics of the clitic cluster and the presence or absence of clitic doubling and clitic climbing. Varieties chosen constitute a minimal triple, since 1) MC has had a very extended contact with Italian and Italo-Romance varieties having a fairly rich clitic system, 2) BC has been in contact with Austrian German, displaying very scarce cliticization phenomena and 3) TK has been in contact with Serbian Standard, Macedonian and Bulgarian, all with very rich clitic systems. 

Empirically, the project combines fieldwork in terms of a sociolinguistic questionnaire and elicitation tasks in the three areas with a corpus-based study. The latter extends an ongoing study on Torlak to further marginalized South Slavic varieties in order to provide a wider perspective onto contact-related issues. The data is treated both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results of this investigation will therefore not only fill the gap in the empirical description of the use of clitics in understudied varieties and types of contact, but they will also provide a contribution to the fundamental questions on the nature of human language.