Computational Approaches to Historical Linguistics (CA2HL)

The first Summer School in Computational Approaches to Historical Linguistics (CA2HL) took place in the ancient and fascinating city of Plovdiv (Bulgaria) from 21 July to 1 August 2025 as an absolutely original interdisciplinary initiative of the University of York promoted by Dr Dimitar Kazakov, Reader in the Department of Computer Science, in collaboration with Giuseppe Longobardi, Anniversary Professor Emeritus in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science. The event developed as the natural evolution of years of interdisciplinary debate and collaborations of Dr Kazakov with the linguists at York and was also sponsored by the Academia Europaea.

The use of computational and quantitative tools for the study of language history is a relatively recent development, which has been revolutionising the approaches to language history in this century: the University of York was among the first few world-leading centres in teaching and researching this line of inquiry between 2000 and 2025, and this was instumental in achieving the success which has characterised this first edition of the School: in addition to Dr Kazakov and Professor Longobardi, the School hosted international lecturers from the University of Trieste (Dr Crisma), the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Professor Guardiano) and the University of Sofia (Professor Karachanak-Yankova), in addition to receiving local support from the Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv. Even more importantly, the School was attended by students of most diverse provenance: some were coming from Bulgaria itself, but several from Italy, Croatia, Indonesia, Iran, the US, China, India, representing a number of background disciplines (linguistics, computer science, biology and physics) and many higher education institutions across the world.