Latvian folk songs or dainas make up one of the largest bodies of oral literature in the world. Vaira Vikis-Freibergs has assembled a distinguished group of scholars from eight countries who apply a broad spectrum of research approaches to the study of dainas. The result, Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Folksongs, is a balanced overview of this active field of inquiry.

Created in honour of the sesquicentennial of the birth of Kristian Barons, the original compiler, classifier, and publisher of close to 182,000 Latvian folk song texts, Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Folksongs provides an overview of recent research on the dainas and will be of interest to students of comparative literature and semioticians, as well as to specialists in oral literature.