From 17 to 19 August 2026, the Slovak onomastic community and its international partners met in Stará Lesná for the 24th Slovak Onomastic Conference, held under the programmatic title “Continuity, Variability and Innovation in Onomastics.” The venue, the SAV ACADEMIA Congress Centre in the High Tatras, provided an ideal setting for a conference devoted to names, memory, place, language contact, and cultural identity. Stará Lesná, situated near Tatranská Lomnica and Starý Smokovec, placed the discussions in a landscape where geography, settlement history and linguistic heritage are visibly intertwined.
The conference was organised by the Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the Slovak Linguistic Society, and the Slovak Onomastic Commission. Its opening brought together three key institutional voices: Ľubor Králik, director of the institute; Pavol Žigo, chair of the Slovak Linguistic Society; and Juraj Hladký, chair of the Slovak Onomastic Commission. The structure of the programme made the central idea of the conference clear from the beginning: onomastics remains rooted in long scholarly traditions, but its questions and methods are changing rapidly.
The first session, moderated by Iveta Valentová, opened with broad theoretical and methodological perspectives. Milan Harvalík spoke on Continuity and transformations of theoretical-methodological approaches in Slavic onomastics: history, perspectives and dialogue, setting the tone for the whole meeting by asking how Slavic onomastics can remain historically grounded while entering new methodological conversations. This was followed by Pavol Žigo, Iveta Valentová, Peter Malčovský and Patrik Jakubek, whose paper Continuity, variability and innovations in onomastics: structural types of Slovak oikonymy brought the theme directly into Slovak settlement names. Mária Imrichová, in On the border of onymic subsystems, addressed the important question of transitions and overlaps between categories of names. Artur Gałkowski then widened the frame with A systemic perspective on chrematonomastic terminology, reminding participants that names of institutions, products and cultural objects require their own conceptual tools.
The afternoon of the first day moved strongly into South Slavic and intercultural material. Nenad Vuković discussed Word-formation models of personal names in Montenegro, while Amira Turbić-Hadžagić and Đenita Haverić examined Etymological and cultural patterns of Bosnian-Herzegovinian surnames, with special attention to polymotivation and onymic status. Małgorzata Magda-Czekaj presented Linguistic-cultural evidence of Polish-Czech-Slovak relations: history and the present, based on the ISNP, showing how onomastic material can document cultural contact across borders. Pavol Odaloš, with Functions of models of onyms, brought the discussion back to theory by reflecting on the role of models in name analysis.
The final session of the first day focused especially on toponymy and methodological comparison. Мери Јосифовска compared similar models of creating toponyms in Macedonian and Slovak toponymy, while Ewelina Zając explored the types of proper names appearing in verbal fluency research among preschool children, opening a bridge between onomastics and psycholinguistics. Дарко Томовски and Мирјана Вељаноска-Томовска interpreted several toponyms from the Florina region, bringing local historical geography into the discussion. The day ended with Gulnara Bekénova, whose English-language paper Problems of preservation and transformation of historical toponyms in Kazakhstan connected the conference theme to contemporary language policy, historical memory and post-Soviet naming practices.
The second day began with a strong toponymic block moderated by Juraj Hladký. Urszula Bijak opened with Erasing names, a compact but powerful topic pointing to the politics of disappearance, renaming and memory. Jaromír Krško examined Somatisms as primary construction elements of Slovak onymy, showing how the human body and metaphorical body terms structure naming. Michaela Boháčová presented Light and darkness in Czech place names, a semantic study of imagery embedded in toponyms. Iwona Nobis traced the movement from descriptive name to cultural symbol in Polish toponyms, while Anna Ramšáková analysed selected prepositional names in the Kysuce linguistic area against their wider Slovak distribution. Together, these papers showed how place names move between description, metaphor, grammar, region and culture.
The late-morning session, moderated by Milan Harvalík, shifted toward surnames, datasets and computational questions. Ľubor Králik contributed to the study of Slovak surnames of Latin origin, especially formations with the suffix -tor. Martin Diweg-Pukanec presented On the semantics of Slavic dobr- in the Multilingual Onomastic Dataset of the Cividale Gospel, connecting historical name material with multilingual digital resources. Andrea Scheller discussed resettlement and migration in the Czech lands as reflected in surnames. Štefan Toth then addressed one of the most current methodological questions of the conference: The possibilities and limits of using artificial intelligence in the classification of contemporary anthroponymy. This paper clearly marked the innovative side of the conference theme.
The afternoon split into two sections. Section A concentrated first on personal names and surnames in regional, historical and minority contexts. Iveta Valentová discussed the research and specific features of surnames of Slovaks in Hungary. Ján Bauko presented the development of Hungarian anthroponymic research in the ethnically mixed territory of Slovakia. Éva Császári examined the origin, motivation and metamorphosis of surnames in glassmaking settlements of the Bükk Mountains, using marriage and baptismal registers from 1789–1866. Martina Lobotková explored surname change in the history of one village. Alicja Przybylska, in Does my name have meaning?, questioned the limits of traditional anthroponomastic analysis on regional register and questionnaire material.
The later part of Section A moved toward literary, animal and intercultural onymy. Juraj Hladký and Andrej Závodný analysed the degree of identity between fiction and reality in literary onymy, using the story cycle Sváko Ragan z Brezovej. Paweł Graf discussed continuity, change and rupture in the onomastics of fictional worlds in Polish prose. Agnieszka Kołodziej asked about the justification of giving names to animals from a Czech-Polish perspective. Henryk Duszyński-Karabasz examined proper names in Polish-language materials for learning Thai, a topic that expanded the conference toward applied and intercultural naming contexts.
Section B was more urban, infrastructural and chrematonomastic. Piotr Tomasik analysed the names of new railway stations and stops in Poland, Czechia and Slovakia. Jiří Martínek presented Exotica on the map, focusing on Czech street names with Asian, African and Ibero-American motivation. Justyna Groblińska examined types of intervention in urban naming through selected Polish examples. Filip Pacalaj studied cognitive and behavioural aspects in urbanonyms with military motivation. Eli Vanyova Kanova discussed Bulgarian personal names in Slovak official translations, balancing linguistic norm and legal identity.
The second half of Section B continued with names in public, military, marketing and tourist spaces. Olena Karpenko presented Ukrainian Military Ergonyms: Semantic Aspect, a timely topic linking naming, war and institutional identity. Samuela Tomasik examined the newest Russian marketing chrematonyms under the striking formulation Names of war, war of names. Beata Afeltowicz discussed nomination strategies in contemporary Polish publishing houses. Martina Zirhutová closed the section with the onymic landscape of a tourist and ski resort, using Rokytnice nad Jizerou as a case study. The day concluded with dinner and a meeting of members of the Slovak Onomastic Commission.
The third day returned to a joint format and moved toward cultural memory, medieval studies, hydronymy and etymology. Under the moderation of Urszula Bijak, Magdalena Graf opened with In the Paris of the North and Little Rome, offering remarks on the eponymic layer of Polish. Valeriia Neklesova presented an associative study of the Patron the Dog memeplex, bringing contemporary digital culture and cultural memory into onomastic analysis. Jana Wachtarczyková discussed propria and their cultural aura in the light of vector representations, one of the most explicitly computational papers of the programme. Jakub Kurák considered onomastics in the context of medieval studies. Елка Јачева-Улчар then examined models of toponymisation in the southern Slavic area, returning the discussion to the transition from appellative to proper name.
The final session, moderated by Andrej Závodný, gave the conference a strong historical-toponymic conclusion. Nataliia Lisniak spoke on microtoponyms as carriers of the collective memory of deported Lemkos, combining place names with trauma, displacement and remembrance. Hana Svobodová analysed the toponymy of the Broumov region in Czech-German language contact. Erzsébet Győrffy reassessed the Bodrog–Ondava hydronymic problem beyond the explanation of scribal error. Patrik Jakubek contributed a regional hydronymic study of selected water names in the left-side Váh basin in the Galanta district. Finally, Harald Bichlmeier discussed the place name Boderitz in Thuringia and the reconstruction of Proto-Sorbian through the Old Sorbian onomasticon. It was a fitting conclusion: precise etymology, regional evidence, contact linguistics and historical reconstruction brought together the very dimensions named in the conference title.
In numerical terms, the final programme listed 49 papers and 53 individual scholars as paper authors or co-authors. The conference was notably international, with contributions in Slovak, Czech, Polish, South Slavic languages, Macedonian, Ukrainian, English and other Slavic scholarly traditions. Its range was equally broad: oikonymy, anthroponymy, hydronymy, urbanonymy, chrematonymy, literary onomastics, animal names, minority names, legal translation, digital methods, artificial intelligence, corpus work and cultural memory.
What made the 24th Slovak Onomastic Conference especially coherent was the way its title functioned not merely as a slogan, but as a real organising principle. Continuity appeared in the attention to the Slovak onomastic school, historical registers, medieval sources, hydronymy and inherited Slavic methodologies. Variability emerged in the comparison of regional, minority, cross-border and multilingual name systems. Innovation appeared in the use of corpora, vector representations, AI classification, verbal fluency research, digital culture and contemporary urban and military naming.
Stará Lesná thus became, for three days, a meeting point between traditional Slavic onomastics and the newest questions facing the discipline. The programme showed that name studies today are not confined to etymology or local history, although both remain essential. They also engage with migration, war, memory, legal identity, digital communication, artificial intelligence and the symbolic organisation of public space. In that sense, the conference confirmed the vitality of Slovak and international onomastics: a field deeply aware of its scholarly heritage, but fully open to the new realities in which names live.
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