The workshop examines the formation and usage of naval terminology and technical language connected to maritime activities across time and between different regions of the Ancient and Medieval world. Maritime specialised languages are integral to seafaring practice. Today, Maritime English is regulated by international organisations to prevent accidents and ensure clear, fast communication. In the ancient and medieval world, communities of seafarers faced an analogous need for a technical language, both to communicate at sea and to develop and transmit their maritime knowledge. Maritime languages are thus shaped, in different ways and contexts, by the naval technology available to seafarers, by the institutional and administrative settings in which this technology operates, and by the values and beliefs of the seafaring community of practice itself; in turn, they contribute to stabilise and transmit technical knowledge. Specialised languages, or 'technolects', or 'specialised discourses' in Gotti's (2003) terms, have been recognised as integral to technical knowledge since the seminal work of Mauss (1936) and Leroi-Gourhan (1964–65); studies of their specific features have shown that their formation follows particular lexical, morphosyntactic, and discourse patterns (Gotti 2003; Čulić-Viskota & Kalebota 2013). Scholarship on ancient technical lexica has identified three main strategies through which specialised terminologies are created (Schironi 2014): the adaptation of existing terms from the common lexicon; the coining of new terms; and the borrowing of terms from other specialised fields or languages. Syntax and discourse tend to be organised around the avoidance of ambiguity, thus generating patterns that depart from everyday language (Bocanegra-Valle 2011). The supra-local circulation of such languages, especially military and maritime ones, can generate extensive chains of borrowing and adaptation, and can even drive broader linguistic change (Huitink & Rood 2024). Finally, technical languages could function as a marker of social belonging when carried over into different contexts, or contribute, through their acquisition, to transmitting the values and knowledge distinctive of the community of practice that employed them (Lave & Wenger 1991; Eckert 2000). To study these languages in the ancient world is no easy task, as they are often preserved only in documentary texts such as papyri and inscriptions, or at best in manuals that are frequently overlooked and obscure, and their study requires a good understanding of both linguistic phenomena and the relevant technological, societal, and administrative contexts. SAILING THROUGH WORDS CALL FOR PAPERS Our workshop thus seeks to compare the specialised languages of seafaring, shipbuilding, naval administration, warfare, and commerce across periods and regions, from the Aegean Bronze Age to the medieval Baltic and beyond. We aim to ask which processes govern the formation and transmission of these languages, and what role they played for the communities that developed them, offering, in doing so, the first systematic, comparative typology of maritime technical languages, and bringing papyrology, epigraphy, linguistics, philology, and the history of technology into a dialogue that has so far remained fragmented across disciplinary and period-specific boundaries.