Call for Papers
Dates: 14-16.09.2026
Host: Lehrstuhl für Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
The history of ancient languages is intertwined with the phenomenon of language contact. This actively developing aspect of Indo-European studies has benefited from multiple significant contributions in the 25 years following the 9th Fachtagung of the Society for Indo-European Studies, “Sprachkontakt und Sprachwandel” (Halle, 2000). While most studies on contact-induced language change focus on phonology and lexicon, the IG AT 2026 seeks to foreground morphological and syntactic changes arising from interactions of ancient Indo-European languages with each other and with non-Indo-European languages, such as the rise of agglutinative case inflection in Tocharian, the loss of grammatical gender in Armenian, and the spread of HAVE-perfects across Western Europe.
We particularly welcome papers addressing contact-related changes in inflectional and derivational markers, syntactic constructions, and grammatical categories. Besides specific case studies, we welcome discussions of methodological issues related to contact phenomena as well as contributions combining approaches and advances of comparative historical, areal, and typological linguistics.
Submission Details
Please send an anonymized abstract of up to 500 words (excluding references) in PDF format to vgspw-anmeldung@uni-wuerzburg.de.
Deadline for submission: February 28
Notification of acceptance: May 31
Conference page: https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/vgsp/tagungen/ig-at-2026/
The organizing committee
