The first Forum for Arabic Linguistics conference was held at the University of Essex in July 2015. The conference was jointly sponsored by the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex and the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. The invited speakers were:

• Jonathan Owens (University of Bayreuth)
• Louisa Sadler (University of Essex)
• Ghada Khattab (University of Newcastle)
• Reem Khamis-Dakwar (Adelphi University)
• Ahmed Al-Jallad (University of Leiden)

A Q&A session was hosted by Peter Trudgill, and a postgraduate tutorial in sociolinguistics by Uri Horesh (sponsored by the Linguistics Association of Great Britain).