The International Congress of Linguists (CIL) has been
organized by the Linguistic Society of the hosting country under the auspices of
the Comité International Permanent des Linguistes (CIPL). The CIPL was founded in 1928 during the
first International Congress of Linguists, which took place in The Hague (The
Netherlands). The Congress constituted an important landmark in the study of
linguistics since it was the first time that linguistics presented itself as an
autonomous science to the world. The committee of the CIPL included such leading
linguists as Charles Bally, Franz Boas, Otto Jespersen, Daniel Jones, Antoine Meillet.
Subsequent congresses were held in Geneva, Rome, Copenhagen,
and after the war, among other places, in Cambridge (Mass.), Tokyo and Quebec
reflecting the idea that the sites of the congresses should be various
continents of the world. The linguistic congresses have thus gradually developed
into truly international gatherings and had constituted the only major event in
linguistics until the drastic expansion of the field in the seventies of the
last century. The topics discussed at the congresses, too, reflected the rapid
growth of linguistics as a science and its manifold interfaces with psychology,
sociology, anthropology, computer science, philosophy and many other
disciplines. At the same time more and more international linguistic conferences
have been organized in the various subfields of linguistics.
IIn Asia the 13th Congress was held in
Tokyo, Japan in 1982. After twenty-six years the second occasion of the CIL in
Asia (the CIL18) is scheduled to be held in Seoul, in July, 2008, with the
theme ��Unity and Diversity of Languages.��