37.808, Confs: Annual Taal & Tongval Colloquium (Belgium)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-808. Fri Feb 27 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.808, Confs: Annual Taal & Tongval Colloquium (Belgium)

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Date: 25-Feb-2026
From: Vince Liégeois [taalentongval2026 at ivdnt.org]
Subject: Annual Taal & Tongval Colloquium


Annual Taal & Tongval Colloquium
Theme: Language variation and AI

Date: 27-Nov-2026 - 27-Nov-2026
Location: Ghent, Belgium
Contact: Vince Liégeois
Contact Email: taalentongval2026 at ivdnt.org

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics;
General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 15-Apr-2026

On Friday November 27, 2026 the annual Taal & Tongval Colloquium wil
take place at the KANTL in Ghent. This year’s theme is Language
Variation and AI.
The Colloquium will be organized by the KANTL (Koninklijke Academie
voor Nederlandse Taal en Letteren), the Dutch Language Institute
(Leiden), Ghent University, and the University of Antwerp.
There will be three keynote lectures, by:
 - Dong Nguyen – Utrecht University
 - Yanzhu Guo – Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris
 - Hugo van Hamme – KU Leuven
Like any domain of inquiry, the field of language research is going
through a dramatic transformation thanks (or due!) to the rise of
Large Language Models (LLMs). New questions and problems arise, and
old questions can be investigated in new ways. What will be the
consequences of the massive use of LLMs for language variation?
Some examples of research questions are:
 - How do LLMs a\ect the position in the digital world of the
languages, dialects, sociolects, regiolects, ethnolects, etc. which
were hardly or not in the training data?
 - What are the consequences of the use of LLMs for language
diversity?
 - What is the effect of using a non-standard language in a prompt for
image generation?
 - How can we make automatic speech recognition more inclusive, such
that it correctly transcribes all varieties of a language?
 - How can we use LLMs in theoretical linguistic, sociolinguistic and
dialectological research?
 - What are the benchmarks that we need for the evaluation of the
output of LLMs?
In applied linguistics, questions also arise concerning LLMs and
language variation. How do LLMs handle variation within and across
text genres and specialised languages? How do they treat
terminological variants? How can we use LLMs for the purpose of plain
and easy language? Can we use AI to e\ectively measure competence
variation in language education, as well as for automatic feedback in
L2 learning?
We would like to invite papers on these and other questions that
involve the relation between LLMs and variation in human language.
Abstracts (max. 400 words; English or Dutch) for a 30 minute talk (20
minutes + 10 minutes discussion) can be submitted to
taalentongval2026 at ivdnt.org.
Deadline for submission: April 15, 2026.
The results of abstract selection will be communicated by May 15,
2026.
The authors of the selected presentations will be invited to submit
their papers to a special thematic issue of the journal Taal & Tongval
that will appear in the year after the Colloquium.



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