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Students’ Room: Get your linguistics juices pumping!

To have another language is to possess a second soul

Charlemagne

If you have already finished all the past papers, or are looking to take a break from UKLO questions, have a look at these:

A joke to illustrate a driver steering right to go to 'UKLO' instead of the 'UK'
  • Mark Baker: The Atoms of Language (aimed at non-specialists, with lots of talk of paradoxes and cracking codes, and introducing principles of linguistic analysis in the later chapters by comparing syntactic parameters to the periodic table).
  • Dick Hudson: Invitation to Linguistics (accessible, clear, and with a focus on linguistic puzzles)
  • David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (a collection of fascinating facts about language that Crystal beautifully presents. Your school library may already have a copy; if not, ask them to get one!)
A joke: Did you get to round 2? 
We have to add explanations
*shocked face*
A joke:
Should i guess, or is my blank a guess?
  • Diversity Linguistics Comment – a blog about diversity and universals written by linguists for linguists.
  • Humans who read grammars, specially for and by young linguists.
  • Language Log, written by a team of leading researchers.
  • The official International Linguistics Olympiad blog for questions and answers about linguistics
  • The Miam and Kilivila Collection, all about how languages classify objects, written by linguists at the University of Surrey for the general public.
  • Gretchen McCulloch’s lovely website
  • More from Babette Verhoeven:
    • The Ling Space which “is dedicated to bringing you varied, accessible, and up-to-date content and discussion about linguistics and other language topics.”It’s got great short videos on all sorts of linguistic topics, as well as some interviews with experts in their field. It’s run by linguists from McGill University. It does take a formalist approach mostly, but it tackles some challenging concepts in an accessible manner.
A joke:
They told me to try UKLO past papers, i tried Breakthrough
*house catches on fire*
This is fine

Don’t like to read but still wondering what to do? Don’t worry I got you:

A joke:
When you solve UKLO problems, there is no infinity and beyond
A joke to illustrate a student's answer to a UKLO question:
I've finally found it after 15 years, the scroll of truth! 
Student's answer: ABCDEFGH
NOO!

Not entertaining enough? Don’t worry I got you:

A joke:
I tried clicking one of the links, it was not the grammar police

Hopefully you found something fun to watch or read. Oh what’s that? You still don’t know what to do? Maybe you are contemplating a deeper question: ‘what do i do now with my life?’. It’s an interesting question, but I don’t think you’ll find your answer here.