Full Title: Sociolinguistic Variation in Ancient Languages
Short Title: SVAL
Theme: Towards Third Wave approaches and beyond

Date: 26-Mar-2026 - 28-Mar-2026
Location: Cambridge, United Kingdom
Contact Person: Dalia Pratali Maffei, Solveig Hilmarsdottir
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://svalconference.wordpress.com

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Call Deadline: 15-Sep-2025

2nd Call for Papers:

We are pleased to announce a conference on Sociolinguistic Variation in Ancient Languages. Towards Third Wave approaches and beyond, which will take place at the University of Cambridge on 26-28 March 2026, at Jesus College and at the Faculty of Classics. The theme is how Third Wave approaches can enhance our understanding of variation in ancient languages, and how we can integrate such approaches with previous methodologies. We focus especially on new methodologies and new corpora, with languages spanning beyond Ancient Greek and Latin, from different language families and from the Mediterranean or further afield. The keynote speakers will be professors Penelope Eckert, Eleanor Dickey and Klaas Bentein.

Third Wave Variationism is the most recent approach to the study of sociolinguistic variation, spearheaded by Eckert (see Eckert 2008). First and Second Wave sociolinguistic studies focussed mainly on the correlation between linguistic variables and social groups, either from macro categories, such as e.g. class, age, and gender, or categories significant within local communities (Weinreich, Labov, & Herzog 1968). Third Wave approaches, on the other hand, are mostly stylistic and conceive of variation as a social semiotic system, where language variants index meaning which is reflected by but also constructed in the context. Speakers are seen to act as the main force of the construction of this meaning and its change. Work within the Third Wave has argued that different linguistic variants are not directly correlated to social categories or to a specific social meaning, but that their meaning is unspecified and dynamic, and that it is activated by the usage of variables in different contexts (Hall-Lew, Moore and Podesva 2021). A central concept is the ‘indexical field’, i.e. the set of potential meanings linked to a linguistic variant (Eckert 2012). As society changes, speakers can associate new meanings with linguistic variants and, in reverse, new contexts of usage can activate new meanings, both at a conscious or at an unconscious level.

Some steps have been taken towards integrating Third Wave approaches to the study of historical languages like Late Medieval and Late Modern English (e.g., Conde-Silvestre 2016; García-Vidal 2023). Nevertheless, the sociolinguistic study of ancient languages has up until now mostly been tackled from First and Second Wave perspectives (e.g. Horrocks 2010; Adams 2013; Mancini 2014) and it requires different methods (cf. e.g., Bentein 2019).

Many aspects of ancient linguistic data differ from the data commonly dealt with in historical sociolinguistics; our data are e.g., purely written and often transmitted indirectly (such as in the process of manuscript transmission). In the case of ancient inscriptions, we often lack information about writers as well as (intended) readers, and metalinguistic testimonia often postdate our primary sources by several centuries. In addition, tracing the reallocation of social meaning is often challenged by the lack of quantitative data for the frequency of linguistic variables in certain contexts in the first place. Recent scholarship on Post-Classical Greek papyri has brought Third Wave approaches to the study of pragmatic and lexical elements and their interaction with the paratext, such as e.g. materiality and layout, rather than morpho-phonologocal features (cf. e.g. the volume edited by Bentein 2024).

This conference aims to explore more broadly how qualitative Third Wave approaches can enhance our understanding of variation in ancient languages, and how we can integrate such approaches with previous quantitative methods. Languages with large corpora of varying text types, such as Greek and Latin, clearly lend themselves well to this type of analysis; we also encourage submissions from other ancient language traditions, from the Mediterranean area or further afield, and from other language families. Research questions may include but are not limited to:

- How do we develop methodologies for applying Third Wave approaches to texts from the ancient world?
- How can we apply the framework of indexicalities to intra/inter-language variation in ancient sources?
- How did different stylistic processes come together to produce social meaning, and how can we identify these?
- Can we trace the construction of different meanings through the co-occurrence of features, rather than features in isolation? Did the usage of features in different registers or genres have an impact on the construction of their meaning?
- Are there linguistic levels more prone to variation and therefore association with meanings than others? How do features inherently indexical to a specific context (such as deictics) interact with features not inherently indexical?
- How can we complement our data with metalinguistic sources? How did local and social meanings interact with wider macro-social categories? Can we trace diachronic changes in social meanings in parallel with socio-cultural and ideological shifts?

The conference will take place at the University of Cambridge on 26-28 March 2026, at Jesus College and at the Faculty of Classics. There will also be a chance to attend online; online presentations can be arranged in exceptional circumstances. We invite abstracts in English of up to 500 words (references excluded) from researchers at all career stages (PhD students included), with a focus on early career scholars. Papers focussing on methodological approaches will be especially welcome, but we will also consider papers dealing mainly with new data and corpora. Accepted papers will be 20 minutes long, followed by 10 minutes for questions.

Abstracts should be submitted as anonymised Word/PDF documents by 15th September 2025 to [email protected]. Notice of acceptance will be given on 15th October 2025. We plan to have ca. 15-20 papers across the three days, along with the three longer keynote talks. Note that for those interested, we intend to publish selected papers as a volume or as a special issue (more information to follow in due course).

A conference dinner will take place on the evening of Friday March 27.

For full list of references, please see the conference website.