The dialect data in this database is based on an online questionnaire distributed over the internet in the period March/April 2009. The respondents were contacted via emails in which they were provided with a link (URL) and invited to fill in the questionnaire.The sociolinguistic situation in Slovenia is such that this available range of respondents was not a big disadvantage. The mother tongue of Slovene speakers of all generations is as a rule one of the dialectal varieties, and not the standard language, and they preserve it through regular use when speaking to other users of the same dialect or a mutually intelligible dialect.

The questionnaire consisted of 19 questions; in total there were 137 sentences. The questions included both judgment sentences and translation tasks. For the judgment task the respondents were asked to judge a given sentence, they could score a sentence with marks ranging from 1 to 5. The marks were defined as follows:

1. non-existant in my dialect
2. very rare in my dialect
3. sometimes used in my dialect
4. often used in my dialect
5. used daily in my dialect

The question sentences mainly focus on syntactic doubling and related phenomena.

The Slovene Dialect Database contains responses of 126 informants. The respondents are all speakers of a Slovene dialect. Information concerning their age, gender, profession and place of birth has also been gathered. The age of the informants ranges from 21 to 63, the majority of the informants are in their twenties. The data that has been collected covers as much of the Slovene language area as possible.

If the questionnaire was not completed fully enough, that is, if not enough questions were answered for the questionnaire to be useful, the questionnaire was not included in the database.

The question sentences and the translations have been enriched with part-of-speech tags from the Edisyn tag set, which are in turn compatible with the ISOcat tag set (for more information on these tag sets www.meertens.knaw.nl/edisyn/searchengine and www.isocat.org). In addition, the dialect data has been translated into English, on a word-by-word basis.

The responsible person for the Slovene dialect database is Marko Hladnik (mhladnik@gmail.com). The Slovene database is made public by the Meertens Institute at www.meertens.knaw.nl/edisyn/searchengine.