The International Quantitative Linguistics Conference (QUALICO 2025) took place from 26 to 28 June 2025 at Masaryk University’s Faculty of Arts in Brno, Czech Republic. Organized jointly by the International Quantitative Linguistics Association (IQLA) and the Department of Czech Language at Masaryk University, the event brought together around ninety participants from over twenty countries, including researchers from Austria, Germany, Finland, Japan, Brazil, China, the United Kingdom and the United States. Over sixty oral and poster presentations were delivered across three days, confirming the continued vitality and interdisciplinarity of quantitative linguistics.

The conference opened on Thursday with a plenary lecture by Emmerich Kelih (University of Vienna) entitled “Gustav Herdan and mobile Quantitative Linguistics: Brno/Brünn – Vienna – Bristol.” This talk paid tribute to Gustav Herdan (1897–1958), one of the early pioneers of quantitative linguistics, who was born in Brno, studied in Prague and Vienna, and later moved to the UK.

On Friday, Natalia Levshina (Radboud University, Nijmegen) delivered her invited lecture “Communicative efficiency: linguistic laws and orders”. The conference concluded on Saturday with Andrea Nini (University of Manchester) presenting “Language models as cognitively realistic mathematical models of grammar.”

A welcome reception, conference dinner and guided tour of Brno’s villa gardens fostered informal exchange and strengthened the international research community.

QUALICO 2025 continued the tradition of the series founded in 1991 in Trier under the initiative of Reinhard Köhler. Previous editions have been held in Moscow, Helsinki, Prague, Athens, Graz, Belgrade, Olomouc, Trier, Wrocław and Lausanne. The Brno meeting highlighted both continuity and renewal in the field: while classical statistical and stochastic laws of language remain central, new research increasingly engages with machine learning and LLM.

With its strong scientific program, lively discussions and welcoming atmosphere, QUALICO 2025 demonstrated that quantitative linguistics is evolving rapidly while remaining anchored in its empirical and mathematical foundations. The next conference, QUALICO 2027, is planned for Barcelona, Spain (details still being finalized).