About

The AMC Symposium has been conceived as a biennial event hosted by the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.  The topic of the Symposium will generally revolve around historical linguistics with a different theme each time.

The first such event took place in June 2016, and focused broadly on the theme of Historical Dialectology, thus establishing a link between the Institute for Historical Dialectology and the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics, which succeeds it.

While the Symposium is meant to be a biennial event, in 2018 Edinburgh hosted the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, and, instead of running the Symposium that year, the AMC helped host that conference and a special Workshop on visualisations in historical linguistics therein.

The third Symposium was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but eventually took place on 5-7 December 2022, with the topic: “Change in syntax and phonology: the same or different?”

The Fourth AMC Symposium took place on 2-4 December 2024 and focused on the theme of “Contact and Language Change”. 

The Fifth AMC Symposium is due to take place in December 2026. We expect the Call for Papers to be available in early 2026.

The general objectives of the AMC Symposium are to:

• promote the AMC as a hub for historical linguistics research
• provide a networking opportunity for academics, early career scholars and students interested in historical linguistics and language change.
• produce a body of historical linguistic research which can be disseminated to a wider academic audience