AILA is the acronym for Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée or International Association of Applied Linguistics. AILA (originally founded in 1964 in France) is an international federation of national and regional associations of Applied Linguistics. AILA has a membership of more than 8.000 individuals worldwide who as researchers, policy makers or practitioners are active in the field of Applied Linguistics.

Applied Linguistics is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary field of research and practice dealing with practical problems of language and communication that can be identified, analysed or solved by applying available theories, methods and results of Linguistics or by developing new theoretical and methodological frameworks in Linguistics to work on these problems. Applied Linguistics differs from Linguistics in general mainly with respect to its explicit orientation towards practical, everyday problems related to language and communication. The problems Applied Linguistics deals with range from aspects of the linguistic and communicative competence of the individual such as first or second language acquisition, literacy, language disorders, etc. to language and communication related problems in and between societies such as e.g. language variation and linguistic discrimination, multilingualism, language conflict, language policy and language planning.