Foreword

The fourth volume of the series "Onomastica Uralica" is dedicated to the borrowing of toponyms in the Uralic languages.

Our invitation for specialists in Finno-Ugrian onomastics to contribute to the present was warmly welcomed and the editors received more articles than anticipated. Therefore, we decided to publish two books instead of just one, as originally planned. These two books will eventually contain 17 articles, eight which of are included in this volume. The rest of the materials will be published in the volume Onomastica Uralica 6. The articles of the present volume concentrate on Finnic and Saami language contacts, whereas the articles in the forthcoming volume will deal with Permian and Ugric contacts with the neighbouring languages.

The editors have made an effort to find the leading specialists on Finno-Ugrian toponomastics as contributors to this volume. In the course of this work it has turned out that in many cases it has been difficult to find acknowledged scholars willing to contribute articles on several problems central to Finno-Ugrian toponomastics and prehistory.

As the Finno-Ugrian language family consists of several dozens of languages spoken in a vast area from Central Europe to Siberia, there must be numerous (probably a hundred or so) language contact zones in which at least one Uralic language is involved. For obvious reasons, it is thus not possible to write a book that would deal with the toponymic contacts of the Uralic languages in their entirety. It has been necessary to select specific themes for the present volume and, of course, this selection process has been guided by scholarly history and the availability of authors.

Thus, in the articles of the present volume, several regions traditionally considered interesting from the point of view of language contacts in the realm of Uralic languages are considered.

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