This conference is the third of the DiLegMa series, after editions hosted in Paris in 2024 and in Bern in 2025. The conference aims to bring together descriptive/documentary linguists who engage with legacy materials on their language (or language group) of specialization. Hosted by Université Paris Cité's Histoire des théories linguistiques research group, the conference will provide opportunities for exchange with historians of linguistics, and its themes are therefore situated at the interface of these subdisciplines of linguistics.

For linguists involved in language description and documentation, the multiple crises of the last few years have in some cases made access to field sites difficult. This has often led to a renewed interest in exploring earlier descriptive materials— Legacy Materials — as objects of study in their own right, and/or to complement field data collected in person. Legacy materials frequently pose interpretational challenges for present-day linguists. Some reasons for possible difficulties in retrieving and/or reconstructing the original intent and context of the materials may include the following: incomplete or missing metadata; unfamiliar terminology, ontological systems, frameworks; challenging presentation styles and typographies.

Notwithstanding the difficulties in accessing and engaging with them, these materials can often be treasure troves of insights about the people and times which produced them, and contribute in a tangible way to our understanding of earlier practices around collecting and producing linguistic data. Additionally, Legacy Materials may contain data which can provide insights for diachronic work; otherwise inaccessible lexical data; textual materials in registers or genres missing from the contemporary corpus; morphological data necessary to complete paradigms. At the meta-grammaticographical level, these resources can possibly inform us about, among other things, earlier data collection methodology, the development of data annotation and glossing practices, the evolution of grammatical categories and their interrelations, approaches to language description, and the changing role of the various subfields of linguistics in descriptive work, among others.