This collection of essays brings together work devoted to little-known minority cultures represented by endangered, and in some cases disappearing, languages. Each chapter investigates and analyses how bears are perceived in the languages and customs of a culture from an ethnolinguistic perspective. The chapters in Part One explore the way bears are perceived through oral and literary traditions in Western Europe, Siberia, the Russian Far East, Iran and Central Asia. In Part Two, contributors examine stories told by people who have directly encountered bears in Alaska, Greenland, Europe, Central Asia, Siberia and the Russian Far East, and analyze what these stories reveal about their cultural beliefs and environment, as directly expressed in their languages.

Tatiana B. Agranat is Associate Professor, Leading Researcher, and Head of Group for Finno-Ugric Languages at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Professor in the Department of General and Comparative Linguistics at Moscow State Linguistic University, Russia.

Leyli R. Dodykhudoeva is Senior Researcher in the Department of Indo-European Languages, Section of Iranian Languages, at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.