In the summer of 1985, I participated in a pilot projed to investigate the possible occurrence of 'linguistic simplification' in the Carinthian dialects of Slovene. Given, among other factors, the radical increase in bilingualism among the Slovene-speaking population of Carinthia over the last several generations and the concurrent reduction in the number of active Slovene speakers. it was expected that the best chance of success would lie in contrasting the speech of non-ethnically conscious Slovene speakers in a number of villages with that of older informants in the same villages. This would also permit the discovery of any regional variations in linguistic change which might exist. Unfortunately, because the question of what language/dialect one speaks and what that speech form is called is, in Carinthia. a very political one, it proved to be more difficult than anticipated to find willing 'nezavedni' informants. Of necessity, therefore, it was decided that the informants in the two categories to be compared would have to be ethnically conscious Slovenes. It was hoped that the greatest variation in usage would be found in the speech of two widely separated age categories, under 30 and over 60. As a consequence, any variation found to exist would most probably be attributable to trends of linguistic change in the speech form of the people actively using the language, as opposed to possible signs of 'linguistic decay' exhibited as the speech form falls into disuse. To maximize the chances of finding significant variation, it was decided to look at parts of the grammar where it was suspected that inter-generational differences would more likely be found. The areas chosen were ones such as irregular noun declensions, the supine/infinitive distinction, case government by verbs which do not take a preposition, pronominal adjectival agreement, and the case government of various prepositions. If you simply tape conversations between two speakers of a dialect, these areas of grammar are especially difficult to collect data for, because they seem to occur too seldom. Since almost all of the Slovene speakers in Carinthia are bilingual, it was decided to have the informants translate phrases and sentences from German into the local Slovene dialects. The data obtained in this manner seem to be quite representative of the local dialects, because when the author's informants hesitated while responding, it was usually in an attempt to avoid German vocabulary as opposed to indecision concerning matters of grammar. Even prompting of the informants for, or with, the desired form, when necessary. did not seem to have any ill effect on the data collected. Due to the survey nature of this preliminary research, the data collected tend to be somewhat sketchy. Furthermore, the data discussed here represent only a subset of what was collected-the questionnaire took about an hour to administer. In an effort to find general trends of change, I attempted to get comparable data in four different villages. Because of logistical problems and the reticence of many people to act as informants, I do not have a great number of informants from anyone village. Consequently, there are not enough data to talk about frequencies. However, I hope that this paper, which should be