Elisabeth Piirainen received her Ph.D. in German philology and linguistics from the University of Münster, Germany. She has been a lecturer at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and a leader of projects on dialect research in Westphalia, Germany. She has written 10 books and 130 articles. One focus of her work is idioms of endangered languages; cf. her two-volume study on phraseology of a Low German basis dialect (2000) and her (co)editorship of Endangered Metaphors (2012) and Language Endangerment (2015). Other topics are theory of conventional figurative language, idiom motivation, cultural foundation of figurative lexical units, and her large-scale research project ¿Widespread Idioms in Europe and Beyond.¿