The ICL was started in April 1928 in The Hague^[5] where it organized its first edition, and subsequent editions have been held in cities such as Geneva in 1931,^[6] Rome in 1933 and Copenhagen in 1936.^[7] The first congress has been read as marking an intellectual split of the emergent discipline of linguistics from traditional philology,^[8] though in 1952, the seventh congress was held in London, hosted by the Philological Society.^[9] A more recent congress took place in Paris in 1997.^[10]

The 18th International Congress of Linguists took place in 2008 in the city of Seoul, South Korea.^[11]

The Swiss Linguistics Society (SSG) proposed that the 19th congress would be organized in Ferdinand de Saussure’s city Geneva, one century after he died, to commemorate his important contributions to the field of linguistics. The events took place from July 21 to July 27, 2013.^[12] The 19th ICL was about the language-cognition interface,^[13] a topic of cognitive linguistics based on the foundational work of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist who is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics. During the Congress, several sessions were held about major aspects of linguistics, including the origin of language, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics.^[14]

• List of linguistics conferences