This volume came about in response to a need which had become time-consumingly obvious to the editor: people investigating a wide variety of precariously placed speech forms, in geographically diverse locations, were working in ignorance of each other's efforts. A kind of clearinghouse role had fallen to me, simply because I had published a book in a subfield which had no journal or other regular publication outlet, the subfield which had come to be known (for better or worse) as “language death”. I was spending increasing amounts of time putting researchers in touch with colleagues whose work was likely to be of interest to them, arduously passing along information on a case-by-case basis. Very late one night I found myself considering alternative solutions to the problem; this volume represents one of those alternatives.

Because of the circumstances in which the volume was conceived, a firm, ongoing part of the enterprise has been intercommunication: dissemination of methodologies, data, ideas, analyses, implications, hypotheses. A set of focus questions (see Introduction) was circulated to all potential contributors to help stimulate thinking along various but shared lines, and a month or so after the target date for first drafts from contributors, each manuscript then in hand was circulated to those who were clearly working on matters of relevance to one another's subject. Contributors were encouraged to correspond with each other and to incorporate crossreferences to each other's papers in their own chapters. All of the internal crossreferencing in this volume arises from authors' perception of what in other papers has special relevance to their own work, not from the editor's perception.