The Circum-Baltic Languages: v. 1: Past and Present

ISBN-13: 9789027230577 / Angielski

Opis

The area around the Baltic Sea has for millennia been a meeting-place for people of different origins. Among the circum-Baltic languages, we find three major branches of Indo-European - Baltic, Germanic and Slavic, the Baltic-Finnic languages from the Uralic phylumand several others. The circum-Baltic area is an ideal place to study area and contact phenomena in languages. The present set of two volumes look at the circum-Baltic languages from a typological, areal and historical perspective, trying to relate the intricate patterns of similarities and dissimilarities to the societal background. In this volume, surveys of dialect areas and language groups bear witness to the immense language diversity in the area with special attention to less well-known languages and language varieties and their contacts.