It is with great pride and pleasure that we open the preface to this year’s Proverbium volume with further encouraging news about the journal’s growing recognition and reach. In 2026, Proverbium has been elevated in the SCImago Journal Rank to Q3, a milestone that confirms its stable position within international humanities scholarship and, in particular, the fields of paremiology, linguistics, and folkloristics. We warmly thank our readers who follow our work, cite our articles, and recommend Proverbium in their own teaching and research. In addition, Proverbium has recently received important quality-control labels that further strengthen its profile as a trusted venue for proverb studies. The journal has been awarded the Diamond Open Access Certificate (Fully Diamond OA) as well as the status of Hrčak Certified Journal. The quality of Proverbium has also been formally acknowledged in Croatia and Hungary, where the journal has recently been ranked among the highest-level scientific publications in the humanities. In Croatia, the National Council for Science, Higher Education and Technological Development has classified Proverbium as an A1 scientific journal, placing it in the top category of scholarly outlets. In Hungary, Proverbium is ranked at level A in Linguistics and Ethnography in the Hungarian Science Bibliography database of scientific publications, which confirms its importance as a reference journal for regional and international scholarship. Our efforts to increase the visibility and discoverability of paremiological work are reflected not only in these recognitions but also in our editorial infrastructure. Alongside the DOI identifiers, we have now introduced the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) subject identifiers for all articles in this volume. UDC is an internationally used bibliographic classification system that organizes knowledge across disciplines by assigning structured numerical codes to subject areas, making it easier for libraries and databases to index and retrieve materials by topic. By including UDC codes, we ensure that articles in Proverbium are more readily searchable in library catalogues and digital repositories, thereby enhancing their long-term visibility and facilitating interdisciplinary access to paremiological research.

The preparation of Volume 43 has once again brought numerous editorial and organizational challenges, ranging from a significant number of submissions to the careful coordination of peer reviews across several countries and languages. These challenges have been successfully overcome thanks to the expertise and dedication of our esteemed reviewers, who meticulously read all submitted papers and helped us select those that best contribute to the advancement of proverb scholarship. We extend our sincere gratitude to Azra Abadžić Navaey, Saša Babič, Péter Barta, Elke Cases, Fionnuala Carson Williams, Christian Grandl, Myriam Huéscar Villa, Ivana Jozić, Tamás Kispál, Anna Konstantinova, Outi Lauhakangas, Marcas Mac Coinnigh, Ana Mansilla, Yoram Meital, Matej Meterc, Wolfgang Mieder, Goran Milić, Draženka Molnar, Boško Pešić, Leonard Pon, Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, Manuel Sevilla Muñoz, Grzegorz Szpila, Anna T. Litovkina, Katalin Vargha, and Damien Villers for their invaluable work on this volume. We are particularly grateful to our reviewers for their support in addressing one of the most pressing challenges currently facing scholarly publishing: the unethical use of artificial intelligence tools in academic writing. As of this issue, the Editorial Board of Proverbium has adopted a Code of Conduct regarding the use of AI in scholarly publishing, which clearly defines acceptable and unacceptable uses of AI-based assistance in research, writing, and review. This policy is important because it protects the integrity of scholarly work, promotes transparency and accountability, and ensures that the originality, authorship, and methodological soundness of paremiological research remain at the forefront of our editorial practice. 

The 43rd volume of Proverbium once again reflects the diversity and richness of contemporary proverb studies. The contributions in English, German, Russian and Spanish languages cover a wide range of topics and approaches, from historical and philological analyses of traditional proverb collections to corpus-based studies of modern proverbial expressions, from comparative research on regional proverb traditions to explorations of proverbial creativity in literature, media, and everyday communication. Volume 43 also arrives at a moment when many of us are rethinking our research practices, and our relationship to digital tools. The contributions collected here offer concrete materials for those reflections: they show how traditional sources can be revisited with new methods, how corpora can illuminate familiar proverb themes in unexpected ways, and how proverb scholarship can respond to contemporary ethical and technological concerns without losing sight of its humanistic foundations. We hope that this issue will be read not only as a collection of individual case studies, but as an invitation to imagine what paremiology can become in the years ahead.

With these thoughts, we leave the pages of Volume 43 in your hands. We are grateful for the trust you place in Proverbium as readers, authors, and reviewers, and we look forward to seeing how the ideas developed here will be taken up, challenged, and transformed in future work.

Melita Aleksa Varga and Hrisztalina Hrisztova-Gotthardt