History

Although the linguistics olympiads have an international history dating from 1965 in Russia, 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. Since then a consortium of English-speaking countries have constituted ELCLO, the English-Language Computational Linguistics Olympiad, as a means for pooling resources; but their shared resources are hosted by NACLO. The committee charged with setting up UKLO is a subcommittee of the Committee for Linguistics in Education (CLIE).

Here are some basic statistics showing how the new project is going:

2010: 560 entries (223 Foundation, 337 Advanced) from 28 schools.
2011: 1165 entries (349 Foundation, 816 Advanced) from 49 schools.
2012: 1912 entries (432 Foundation, 498 Intermediate, 982 Advanced) from 300 schools.

Some other links: