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