Jurica Polančec, PhD, a member of the project team, participated in the international conference Quantitative Diachronic Linguistics and Cultural Analytics: Data-Driven Insights into Language and Cultural Change, held at King’s College in London, United Kingdom on January 15 and 16, 2026.

He presented a paper entitled Patterns of variation in nominal inflection in Croatian Church Slavonic: An exploratory study, in which he reported on the research on feminine a-stem nouns in Croatian Church Slavonic.

The research is based on the texts in the Beram database, which are morphologically annotated and provide rich insights into the mixing of noun declension patterns in Croatian Church Slavonic. The research focused on the mixing of the case endings –i and –e in a-declension nouns in the four cases in which these ending occur (genitive singular and nominative, accusative and vocative plural).

The corpus analysis showed that the mixing occurs mainly through the spread of the ending –e at the expense of the ending –i in nouns with hard (non-palatal) stems, which also corresponds to historical data for much of the Croatian language area. It was further determined that the spread is limited mostly to breviaries and then only some of their parts, most notably in the second part of the Second Beram Breviary.

Further research will attempt to determine whether the presence of the ending –e among nouns with hard stems in breviaries is related to specific texts within these breviaries.