The studies gathered together in this book were originally presented at two conferences sponsored by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), which were held at the VU University Amsterdam, in late August 2004.

The first part Language Endangerment and Endangered Languages deals with issues related to language endangerment and the problems linguists and other researchers encounter when documenting these languages, both in general terms and with an eye on the Andean/Amazonian situation.

The second part, Specific Studies: Languages and Cultures of the Andean-Amazonian Border Area, contains three sections. The first deals with topics that relate to the Maku peoples and languages of Brazil (Eastern Maku) and Colombia ( Western Maku ). The second section features papers that address anthropological and grammatical issues concerning the Nambikwara peoples and languages (Brazil). The third section discusses various other languages in the Andean/Amazonian border area.

The editor of the book, Leo Wetzels, was recently appointed as a research director (directeur de recherche) at the Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie (LPP), Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)/Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle, in Paris. He has retained a part-time appointment as Professor of Romance and Amazonian languages at the VU University Amsterdam to supervise his PhD students, who are working mainly on endangered South-American languages. His personal research is directed towards questions of phonological and morphological typology, for which the properties of the Amazonian languages play a decisive role, and the phonology of Brazilian Portuguese.