Call for Papers

Tracing Albanian in Time, Space, and Texts 

Call for Papers Extended Until December 31st, 2025 

The University of Basel, its Department of Ancient Civilizations, and the Lectureship in Comparative-Historical Linguistics, together with the Institute for Slavic and Eastern European Studies of the University of Zurich, invite you to Tracing Albanian in Time, Space, and Texts, an international conference on Albanian historical linguistics and philology, which will take place in Basel, Switzerland, from June 8th to 10th, 2026. We aim to bring together scholars and students studying the history of the Albanian language and its texts and welcome contributions dealing with the history of Albanian in the broadest sense. Possible topics include:

❖ Old Albanian texts, their analysis, and their background

❖ Old Albanian linguistics

❖ The reconstruction of Proto-Albanian and its pre-stages

❖ Ancient, medieval, and modern language contact between Albanian and other languages

❖ (The history of) dialect variation within Albanian

❖ Albanian etymologies

Proposals regarding original, previously unpublished research are invited in two formats: individual papers (for slots of 20+10 minutes) and posters. We encourage BA and MA students who have worked in this field to submit an abstract. Abstracts for oral or poster presentations should be no longer than 450 words (including references and 3–5 keywords). Abstracts for oral presentations must be submitted before December 31st, 2025; the inscription for poster presentations is also open until December 31st, 2025. All submissions must be sent to aliaconference2026@gmail.com in either .docx, .tex, or PDF format. 

Oral presentations may be given in English, German, French, or Italian, but English is preferred. Posters may be written in one of these four languages or Albanian.