The founding of AILA was agreed at the International Colloquium of Applied Linguistics held at the University of Nancy, France in 1964 (hence the acronym from the Association’s name in the French language). This was the outcome of two years’ preparatory work and discussion and the financial support of the Council of Europe. At that time, the clientele to be served by this new international association was confined mainly to linguists and language teachers in Europe. Bernard Pottier was the Association’s first President, supported in organizational and administrative matters by Max Gorosch. The founding congress, held in Nancy, was almost exclusively run in French, and the main strands into which contributions were organized were automatic translation, language teaching and research cooperation in Europe.

Bernhard Pottier had no direct successor until 1969 when, at the Second International Congress of Applied Linguistics (in fact, this was the first congress with this title), held at the University of Cambridge, AILA was effectively re-founded with Pit Corder as President and Bertil Malmberg as Secretary General. From then on, AILA had a consistent organisational structure and congresses were held on a triennial basis. From then also, English became the de facto lingua, although the Association was officially French/English bilingual from its inception. The Cambridge congress also adopted the format followed by subsequent AILA congresses of strands representing contemporary issues in applied linguistics. These have included the psychology of second language learning, sociolinguistics, and contrastive linguistics, language education policy, language in professional practice and professional contexts, language diversity, languages in society and language technology, artificial intelligence and more. COVID-19 and the changed circumstances brought about by it, however, have led to new and innovative formats with the 2021 congress being completely virtual and the following two congresses held in hybrid mode.

While originally a European initiative, AILA has become truly global over the past 40 years with affiliates now from North America, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. Since 1978, congresses have been held more widely; in Canada, Australia, Singapore, Japan and Malaysia and regional networks now exist to facilitate regional and inter-regional collaboration. Efforts to ensure diversity have been undertaken with board members now coming from different regions. The AILA Applied Linguistics Series (AALS) has provided a forum for established scholars in any area of applied linguistics since 2008. AILA Review , the Scopus-indexed official scholarly journal of AILA first appeared in 1984; from 2003, AILA Review has been published by John Benjamins.