Toponyms at the Frontier: Why I’m Looking Forward to ILANSCO 2026 in Prague

 As someone deeply fascinated by place names and the stories they tell, I couldn’t help but get excited when I saw the call for papers for the upcoming ILANSCO 2026 conference. After its debut in Zurich in 2024, the event is returning in September 2026 - this time in Prague, hosted by the Czech Academy of Sciences - with a timely and resonant theme:

"Emerging Landscapes: Languages and Landscapes in Conflict."

While ILANSCO isn't exclusively an onomastic event, it's precisely this interdisciplinarity that makes it so appealing for scholars interested in toponyms, place-making, and the language of landscapes. It's not often you get anthropologists, linguists, cognitive scientists, and historians in the same room - all discussing how we name, imagine, and contest space.

Landscapes That Speak

For us in toponymy, landscape is never just a terrain - it’s a discursive battlefield, a narrative canvas, a memory map. What names get used on a signpost, who gets to rename a town after a conflict, or how colonial and indigenous toponyms coexist (or clash) - these are deeply political and linguistic acts. ILANSCO’s focus on landscapes in conflict opens the door to exactly these questions.

Even more compelling is the conference’s call to examine how language captures (or fails to capture) bodily, emotional, and social experiences of place. I’ve long argued that place names are not merely labels, but compression points for identity, ideology, and memory. In this sense, ILANSCO offers fertile ground for toponymic scholars to connect the dots between linguistic theory, spatial semiotics, and cultural trauma.

Beyond the Map

The idea of "emerging landscapes" also resonates in a digital sense. With GIS technologies, corpus linguistics, and large-scale name databases now shaping our field, there's a growing need to think about how we operationalize the concept of landscape linguistically and cognitively. How do we model names that have been erased? How do we visualize contested geographies with overlapping toponymies? I’m hopeful that the conference will welcome such contributions.

And let’s not forget: Prague itself is a city steeped in layered place-naming histories - from Czech and German, to Latin and Hebrew. What better place to hold a conference on landscapes in conflict?

Looking Ahead

If you’re working on place names in migration, historical memory, endangered landscapes, or linguistic representations of space - this is the kind of interdisciplinary forum we need. ILANSCO 2026 seems poised to blur the disciplinary lines in all the right ways. I’m already drafting ideas.

🔗 Read the Call for Papers
📅 Deadline: 31 December 2025