This collective volume contains articles about different minority groups in central and eastern Europe, namely on minorities in Austria, in the Balkans -specifically in Albania, Greece, and the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, in Bulgaria, in the Caucasus, in the Czech Republic, in Hungary, in Latvia, in Romania, in Russia, and in Slovakia. One of the authors' main interests is the greatly extended emphasis on the view of linguistic minorities -especially in Eastern Europe-, by which language maintenance and shift are indicators of the preservation or change of ethnicity and the culture of ethnic groups.