The Association

The Greek Applied Linguistics Association (GALA) was founded in Thessaloniki in 1980, and is an affiliate of the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée (AILA), founded in 1964.

GALA promotes scientific research carried out within the framework of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, and facilitates distribution and exchange of information. It also encourages and supports cooperation, at both a national and an international level, in everything related to linguistic research and its applications, with particular regard to education and civilization.

GALA has organized a great number of national and international events, symposia and conferences in Thessaloniki and in other cities in Greece. In 1990 it hosted the AILA World Congress in Halkidiki, Greece.

Applied Linguistics is an interdisciplinary 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.

GALA publishes the Journal of Applied Linguistics (JAL).

Click here for the Association's Constitution in Greek.