UK Linguistics Olympiad

• Introduction
• 2011
  • Dates
  • Register for 2011
• History
• Committee
  • Aims and rules
• Sponsors
• What are the test questions like?
• Past competitions
  • 2010
  • 2009
• Press releases
• educational rationale

Introduction

The UK Linguistics Olympiad is a competition for students who are still at secondary school, in which they have to solve linguistic data problems. Similar competitions happen in a number of other countries, though it's only recently that they've taken place in English-speaking countries.

The UK Olympiad is part of a consortium of English Language Computational Linguistics Olympiads which developed out of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (for USA and Canada) in 2009, with two other anglophone countries taking part: Australia and Ireland. The consortium shares test materials so its member countries coordinate their test times.

The UK Olympiad also enters a team in the International Linguistics Olympiad . International olympiads for school students exist in a number of other subjects, especially in mathematics and the natural sciences; but they also include olympiads in philosophy and geography.

Arrangements for 2011

Dates

• Round 1: about February 2, 2011
• Round 2: about March 10, 2011

Register for 2011

If you want to enter your school for the 2011 competition, please email Neil Sheldon (n.a.sheldon, then @, then mgs.org), giving your name (as contact person), your email address, the name of your school, your contact mailing address there (just in case we need to send a letter) and any information about your pupils that you think we may find helpful, in particular how many and what age they may be.

History

The linguistics olympiads have an international history dating from the 1960s in Russia, but the UK has only recently joined the movement. The first UK schools took part as guests of the newly founded All-Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO), which in turn built on the relatively new North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO), which allowed AILO to use a selection of test material developed for use in USA schools. The committee charged with setting up UKLO is a subcommittee of the Committee for Linguistics in Education (CLIE).

UKLO Committee

The UKLO committee consists of the following individuals:

• Billy Clark: national publicity
• Willem Hollmann: Treasurer
• Dick Hudson: Chair, website and test selection
• Vivienne Rogers: Secretary, website, schools publicity and support, round 2 tutor
• Neil Sheldon: Vice Chair, administration of round 1 test and schools register, round 2 tutor, chaperone
• Harold Somers: representing AILO and test selection
• Graeme Trousdale: fund raising, round 2 tutor
• Gary Wood: Logistics for round 2 and IOL

Sponsors

• The Linguistics Association of Great Britain
• The British Association for Applied Linguistics
• The Philological Society
• The British Academy
• Routes into Languages
• The School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Sheffield University
• The School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences, Edinburgh University
• Manchester Grammar School
• Continuum Publishers
• Cambridge University Press
• Wiley-Blackwell Publishers

What are the test questions like?

A great many questions from previous linguistics olympiads are available on the internet:

1. All the UKLO tests from 2010, listed individually with answers and comments.
2. two easy problems, plus their answers: Chinese football, Japanese -te
3. another two easy problems
4. a list of fun problems (ranging from easy to hard) collected by Mary Piper (All Saints School, York) to entertain her students during the summer holiday.
5. the test booklet used in the 2009 AILO competition, and the answers and mark scheme (for all but the last two questions, which turned out to be far too difficult for most candidates).
6. a large collection of problems, of different levels of difficulty, used in the North American Olympiad (aka NACLO or NAMCLO)
7. an even larger collection of problems, including those from the International Linguistics Olympiads. (Log in as 'guest'.) If you click 'browse all', you'll see a long list of test questions, mostly paired with their solutions. Not all are written in English, but a large number are. Here are some recommended favourites:
   1. We are all molistic in a way (solution)
   2. A donkey in every house (solution)
   3. Tok Pisin (no solution available)
   4. Micmac (solution)
   5. Scrabble (solution)

Press releases

• 2010
• 2009
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

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