The first ICAAL conference was held at the University of Hawaiʻi in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States on the first week of January in 1973.
[2] On August 30, 2001, in Périgueux, France, interest in reviving ICAAL was rekindled when Gérard Diffloth, Michel Ferlus, and George van Driem met to discuss the history and potential future of ICAAL.
They then went on to host the ICAAL 3 Pilot Meeting in June 2006 at Siem Reap, Cambodia, which was funded by the Dutch Research Council and the École française d'Extrême-Orient.
The ICAAL 3 academic conference was held at the Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute in Pune, India in November 2007, and conferences have since been held biannually.
ICAAL 5 was thus postponed to 2013 and held at the Australian National University.