The chapters of this book come from the 1997 Finnish Conference on Linguistics and theScandinavian Summer School on Language Diversity. A number of the contributions focus onendangered languages, in particular, Ingrian Finnish. Hallamaa discusses developing appropriatemethodologies to study endangered languages and evaluate individual language proficiency.Chapters by Koko and Riionheimo describe the loss of Ingrian through shift to Estonian. Ingrianis, again, the topic for Savijiirvi, who compares and provides a detailed sociohistory of fourBalto-Finnic languages: Votian, Ingrian, Estonian, and Finnish. Duray writes about languagedeath, focusing on the extralinguistic factors that have caused a community-wide shift to Russianby the Nganasan-speaking people.