The area around the Baltic Sea has for millennia been a meeting-place for people of different origins. Among the circum-Baltic languages, we find three major branches of Indo-European -Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic, the Baltic-Finnic languages from the Uralic phylum and several others. The circum-Baltic area is an ideal place to study areal and contact phenomena in languages. The present set of two volumes look at the circum-Baltic languages from a typological, areal and historical perspective, trying to relate the intricate patterns of similarities and dissimilarities to the societal backgroun.