Michif are realities from which linguists hide at their peril. In addition to the details included in the chapters, a number of general questions arise. What de- termines when morphological simplification takes place as structurally similar languages come into contact? The contrast between Kituiba and Lingaila is in-

This bilingual volume (in English and Slovak) opens with the text of the January 27, 1995 "Declaration on the occasion of the celebratory announcement of the codification of the Rusyn language in Slovakia" - printed in Rusyn, in Cyrillic, facing the English translation. Since the occasion had as much political as linguistic significance, a little background is in order. The Carpatho-Rusyns are ethnic East Slavs whose area of settlement since medieval times has been crisscrossed by shifting political boundaries. Until World War I, they lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire; today Rusyn populations are found mainly in western Ukraine (600,000 to 800,000) and in Slovakia (100,000), with smaller groups in Poland, Hungary, and Romania (much as the ethnic and linguistic community of Kurds straddles the national borders of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey). There is also a small Rusyn enclave in the former Yugoslavia, whose dialect is formally recognized as an official minority language (Backa Rusyn, or Vojvodinian-Srem Rusyn), and part of this population now finds itself in still another country: Croatia. The Rusyn subgroups, from the Backa Rusyns to the Lemkos of Polish Galicia or the Huculs who straddle the Romanian border, have