VarDial 2026: https://sites.google.com/view/vardial-2026/

VarDial 2026 will be colocated with EACL 2026 in Rabat, Morocco. We anticipate a discussion on computational methods and language resources for closely related languages, language varieties, and dialects.

We welcome papers dealing with one or more of the following topics:
- Language resources and tools for similar languages, varieties and dialects;
- Evaluation of language resources and tools applied to non-dominant language varieties;
- Cross-lingual transfer and adaptation of models to similar languages, varieties and dialects;
- Automatic identification of lexical variation;
- Automatic classification of language varieties;
- Machine translation between closely-related languages, language varieties and dialects;
- Corpus-driven studies in dialectology and language variation;
- Computational approaches to mutual intelligibility between dialects and similar languages;
- Text similarity and adaptation between language varieties;
- Linguistic issues in the adaptation of language resources and tools (e.g., cognate detection, semantic discrepancies, lexical gaps, false friends);
- Studies focusing on related creole languages and their lexifier languages;
- Studies focusing on diachronic language variation (e.g. phylogenetic methods, historical dialects).
In addition to the topics listed above, we also welcome papers dealing with diachronic language variation (e.g. phylogenetic methods, historical dialects).

Instructions for Authors

Submissions should be formatted according to the ACL Rolling Review template and submitted as a PDF. The review process will be double-blind. More information is on the website (https://sites.google.com/view/vardial-2026/).

Important Dates

- Direct Submission deadline: January 2, 2025 (updated!)
- Pre-reviewed (ARR) submission deadline: January 10, 2026 (updated!)
- Notification of acceptance: January 23, 2026
- Camera-ready paper due: February 3, 2026
- Workshop at EACL (hybrid): March 24-29, 2026 (exact date TBD)

Shared Task: Arabic Modeling In Your Accent (AMIYA)

VarDial 2026 will have a shared task on language modelling for dialectal Arabic (DA), where participants can contribute LLMs trained or adapted for DA. These will be evaluated using the AL-QASIDA benchmark (Robinson et al., 2025), an evaluation suite that comprehensively measures an LLM’s dialectal fidelity, understanding, generation quality, and MSA-DA diglossia in DA. More information: https://sites.google.com/view/vardial-2026/shared-tasks

- Training data release: November 30, 2025
- Registration deadline, eval data finalized: December 15, 2025
- System submission deadline: January 10, 2025
- System description paper deadline: January 20, 2025

Workshop Organizers

Yves Scherrer – University of Oslo (Norway)
Noëmi Aepli – University of Pennsylvania (USA)
Verena Blaschke – LMU Munich and Munich Center for Machine Learning (Germany)
Tommi Jauhiainen – University of Helsinki (Finland)
Nikola Ljubešić – Jožef Stefan Institute and University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)
Preslav Nakov – Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (UAE)
Jörg Tiedemann – University of Helsinki (Finland)
Marcos Zampieri – George Mason University (USA)

Contact: yves.scherrer@ifi.uio.no or verena.blaschke@cis.lmu.de