MOL 12 is the 12th Meeting on the Mathematics of Language, to be held in Nara, Japan, from September 6 through September 8, 2011. MOL meetings are organized biennially by the Association for Mathematics of Language, which is a Special Interest Group of the Association for Computational Linguistics. The location of the meeting usually alternates between Europe and the U.S. Previous meetings were held at Bielefeld University (2009), UCLA (2007), the University of Edinburgh (2005), and Indiana University (2003). The venue of this year's meeting is the first outside of Europe and the U.S.