The papers brought together in the present volume – the third of the Brill series Languages of Asia specifically focussing on Endangered Languages – offer exciting insights on various aspects of minority languages of the vast territories of Northeast Asia, geographically stretching from Siberian Russia to Mongolia and northwest China.
The rich selection of contributions covers various aspects of language endangerment, ethnolinguistic vitality, emic and etic approaches at language preservation, as well as contact-linguistics, and surely represents an important contribution to the Unesco Indigenous Languages Decade, which has right now started (2022–2032).
Most articles are based on contributions to the international conference “Endangered Languages in Northern Asia” convened at the Institute for Turcology of the Free University Berlin, in November 2019. The conference program is available on the official website: https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/turkologie/Veranstaltungen/Vortraege/Program_Symposium.pdf.
We would like to express a few well-deserved words of thanks and gratitude. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the department of Turcology of the Free University Berlin for funding a service contract for Rabia Yıldırım and Nilgün Özkul (Free University Berlin) for formatting issues. Likewise we owe deep gratitude to the National Council for Mongolian Studies for funding a service contract for Davide Rizzi (presently PhD student at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) for his assistance in bibliographical matters. A special word of thank is due to Elisa Perotti and the Brill editing team for their outstanding help and support in editorial issues.
We are also very much indebted with professor Alexander Vovin (Sasha), for agreeing to include this volume in the book series Languages of Asia, that he edited till he passed away last spring, albeit too early and leaving an unbridgeable void in our hearts not to mention the horrible loss for the scientific community. This book is dedicated to his memory.
The Editors