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 is scheduled for 2-4 December 2024 and focuses on the theme of “Contact and Language Change”. 

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