Audio Introduction to UKLO
Puzzle and discover the wonders of the world’s languages.
UKLO (United Kingdom Linguistics Olympiad) is a language-analysis competition for all ages. We create linguistics puzzles and run competitions for school children to encourage a lifelong interest in the world’s languages. Have a look at the support given to UKLO by media outlets, organisations, schools and universities
Add variety for your students with an additional subject that teaches them to make decisions carefully. The skills learnt by students are invaluable when it comes to making focused decisions for themselves and avoiding other distractions.
UKLO Skills Hexagon: What skills are learnt?
Please click to see full details of our educational rationale. Check out our example walkthrough that demonstrates these skills. Give your students the skills they need and register today
Four Levels of Difficulty
We offer the competition at four levels of difficulty for KS2 – KS5, and provide Gold, Silver and Bronze awards, as well as participation certificates, at each level.
Flexible Progression
Students can start at any level and progress to any level. Click here to register your students. Click here to see the different levels.
The highest scoring students proceed through a couple more rounds of testing and coaching before we present them for the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) where they compete against other countries. Click to see our IOL Results.
At a lower level of difficulty, a problem requires an analysis of presented data which allows the competitor to generalise and go beyond the data. But at higher levels, competitors have to not only make these analyses mentally, but also put them into words in an explicit explanation of how the underlying system works.
No fees for schools
The competition is for all ages and entirely free with no costs or additional fees for participants or schools, whether in the national competition, the training camp or the IOL. Registration is also free!
What makes a UKLO question?
What’s so special about UKLO questions anyway?
Know nothing and you’re ready to go!
UKLO questions require no preliminary knowledge in language, linguistics or any other subject taught at school.
Beautifully Crafted and Authentic
A tremendous amount of research goes into UKLO questions from field linguists who have travelled first-hand amongst their chosen language’s native speakers.
Wide variety
From decoding alien messages to scents and smells, UKLO questions are diverse with over 70 confirmed different variations. There is something for everyone.
Keeps the spirit of endangered languages alive
Our examinations have used over 165 different languages. Many languages used by UKLO are indigenous with very few speakers.
No language disadvantage
No disadvantage in problem solving ability if English is not the student’s first language.
Popular among boys and girls!
Both boys and girls excel at UKLO questions. We have a roughly 50:50 boy-girl participation ratio.
The more they do, the better they get
UKLO questions train the brain, each UKLO question solved improves student’s cognitive skills. But remember, everything in moderation!
Really you need to see it to believe it.
Bringing Universities and Schools together
UKLO provides a bridge between linguists at universities and teachers at schools. Linguistics topics usually seen at a university level has been changed, modified and introduced as a challenge for school students. UKLO showcases the work of a linguist, as well as the fundamentals of linguistics usually taught at universities. The materials provided by UKLO are supported by linguists and universities across the UK.
The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind.
Arika Okrent, American Linguist
A new outlook on education
A different language is a different vision of life
Federico Fellini
UKLO in its design and delivery to students showcases a new model of constructivist learning and teaching. We want students to think for themselves and to be inspired by the languages they are asked to discover and analyse. We have found that when students are engaged and genuinely excited in discovering patterns on their own, they become more confident and learn better. Please see our reviews from schools
UKLO problem example walkthrough
The main skill you’ll need is the ability to analyse patterns in language data – in short, the skill of language analysis. This is the basis for linguistics, so once you’ve developed your language analysis, you’re a linguist (= one who does linguistics) – ready to study language and even to do good research.
Linguistics
It’s all about looking behind the raw data to find how the language system works. Imagine a strange language in which adding an -s makes some words singular and others plural; how can that be? What’s going on? In case you haven’t noticed, that strange language is English, where an odd old sock smell+s [singular], but many old sock+s [plural] smell even worse. Why? You could start with the difference between nouns and verbs, and write some rules. Then you might notice some exceptions (e.g. smelled or will among the verbs and mice among the nouns), and wonder whether your units should be endings like -s or abstract features like ‘plural’. But the basic work is done: you’ve found the rules, so, as in any good science, you can now make testable predictions: given the noun gug and the verb chortle, you can predict A gug chortle+s but Gug+s chortle.
In short, you have to ‘crack the code’, using the data as a source of clues to what lies behind – just like a detective investigating a crime, a doctor diagnosing an illness, a scientist studying an unfamiliar substance or species, or an explorer finding a way through unknown territory. Welcome to the science of linguistics!
The olympiad
An olympiad problem, unlike the English example above, presents unfamiliar data, and the challenge for you is to discover the system that lies behind the data; so it’s not a test of your MFL skills.
Here’s an example, taken from a language spoken in the north-east of the Sudan, between the Nile and the Red Sea, by about a million people who are mostly nomads. They call the language ti bedawie, but it’s usually called Beja, based on its Arabic name. The language isn’t used in writing, so the first step in analysing it is to develop a way of writing it down; here we’ll skip that step and go straight into the grammar. Here are some Beja words:
| Beja | English |
| kaam | a camel |
| uukaam | the camel |
| kaamuuk | a camel of yours |
| ikaamuuk | your camel |
| ragad | a leg |
| iragad | the leg |
| tak | a man |
| uutak | the man |
| deefa | a door |
| ideefa | the door |
| meek | a donkey |
| ?? | the donkey |
| laga | a calf |
| ?? | the calf |
Your task is to crack the code to the extent of being able to fill the two empty cells. If you look at the data (i.e. the words that are given to you), the answer may leap out at you; if so, lucky you! If not, here’s how to work it out.
1) What’s the missing bit of information? Each empty cell needs the Beja for ‘the X’, where X is actually given in the cell above – meek for ‘donkey’ and laga for ‘calf’; so what’s missing is the way to express the meaning of English the.
2) Almost all the data pairs ‘a X’ (indefinite) with ‘the X’ (definite), but there is an exceptional pair of English translations: a camel of yours is paired with your camel. If English had been just like Beja, these would have been a your camel and the your camel. Why do you think these forms are not allowed in English?
3)If you look through the earlier forms that translate the X, it’s easy to work out that the meaning ‘the’ is expressed by a prefix attached to the noun; but in some cases, this prefix is uu- (uukaam) and in others it is i- (iragad, ikaami).
4) Why does the form of this prefix vary? Is it because of the choice of the noun (like gender in languages like French)? No, this can’t be so because uukaam and ikaamuuk both contain the same noun (meaning ‘camel’) but have different prefixes.What else might be relevant? If you compare the alternatives, they vary in length: uu, i. So maybe it has something to do with the length of the word to which the prefix is added? This is more promising because uu-kaam has just one syllable after the prefix whereas iragad and ikaamuuk have two; and you’ll notice that in this case the length of the syllables concerned doesn’t matter. At least all the data are consistent with the following rule: Add uu- before one syllable and i- before more than one syllable.
5) You can now fill the empty cells: uumeek and ilaga. Job done!