Language Learning and the Applied Linguistics: A Historical Sketch

This article reviews the history of applied linguistics together with the history of the journal Language Learning, indicating the journal's particular place in that larger history and honoring its 50th anniversary. I adopt a chronological perspective, starting from antiquity but focusing on developments in Europe and North America in the later 19th and 20th centuries. I offer evidence that from the late 1940s onward Language Learning played a distinctive role in the popularization and widespread adoption of the term applied linguistics as well as the systematic, theoretical, and research orientation associated with it.