UKLO for competitors

This page is for school students who are competing, or want to compete, in the UK Linguistics Olympiad (UKLO). Please feel free to use the comments box. If you want more information about how UKLO works in general, or about this year’s competition season (round 1, round 2 and IOL), visit the site for teachers here.

• What to do if you want to take part in the competition
• How to prepare for the competition
• What to do if you’re interested in linguistics

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What to do

Suppose you’ve heard about UKLO, but you haven’t yet taken part. Here’s what to do:

1. Find out whether your school is already registered with UKLO by checking the list here.
2. If it is registered, then one of the teachers must be registered as our contact person. Try to find out who that teacher is by inquiring among teachers; but if that fails, ask UKLO.
3. If your school is not registered, read this page.

How to prepare

To prepare for Round 1,

• Check out the training material ppts on our website.
• Explore the collection of past problems:
  • Start with the easy ‘Breakthrough Workout’ practice problems at #4.
  • Then work through some of the problems used in past olympiads at #2, which get harder as you further down the list.
  • Use these problems to decide which level to enter at, then look at some of the past papers at that level which you’ll find at #3.
  • If you’re ambitious, enter for the Advanced level and have a look at the suggestions for preparing for Round 2!
  • If you want to be impressed, have a look at the problems created by past UKLO champions.

If you’re selected for Round 2, check here for practical details about what to expect, and find out something about linguistics.Here are some suggestions:

• Look up ‘Linguistics’ on Wikipedia and browse through some of the articles about the subject on a professional website such as that of the Linguistic Society of America.
• Try some of the word puzzles in Alex Bellos’s So you think you’ve got problems book.
• Watch some videos made by a past champion, Neema Kotonya, about how to solve some past IOL problems:
  1. IOL 2007 Problem 1 (Braille) 
  2. IOL 2007 Problem 2 (Movima)
  3. IOL 2004 Problem 3 (Latin)

And if you’re really serious about the international competition, try

• 20 tips by Ellie Warner (Gold Medal 2014) for the IOL
• a page for you about the linguistics you should know
• the Facebook page for the International Linguistics Olympiad (=IOL)
• and this one for Bulgaria 2015
• and this IOL blog (which includes an ‘Ask a linguist’ option)
• the classic book on solving mathematical problems: George Pólya’s ‘How to Solve it.’ (1945) (download it here; buy it here).

 And if you’re interested in linguistics …

• Visit an online class on linguistics:
  • a MOOC. (In case you don’t know, a MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course, i.e. a collection of  teaching material, especially videoed lectures, which is freely available online. The ones listed below are all in English)
    • A three-lecture “Introduction to Linguistics” by the University of Birmingham.
    • “The Virtual Linguistics Campus” (a wide range of courses and individual online lectures at Marburg, Germany).  See the introductory video on Youtube, then register on the campus and sign up for the course Linguistics 101 – Fundamentals. This is a permanent MOOC so you can sign up at any point.
    • “Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics” (5 weeks at Leiden, The Netherlands)
    • Corpus Linguistics (i.e. the study of language using software to analyse large bodies of text)
    • Introduction to Natural Language Processing 
    • History of English
  • Linguistics podcast – a Youtube collection of talks about linguistics
  • Watch a TED talk about linguistics such as:
    • Where did English come from?
    • How languages evolve
    • (More under recommendations from Babette, below)
  • Diversity Linguistics Comment – a blog about diversity and universals written by linguists for linguists.
• Try reading the introductory linguistics course on the UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) website – quite technical, but it may suit your taste.
• Browse the collection of fascinating facts about language which are beautifully presented in  David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Your school library may already have a copy; if not, ask them to get one!
• Read one of the following introductory books (and leave comments in the comments box!):
  • Larry Trask: Language: The Basics (for a quick, engaging read)
  • Larry Trask: Introducing Linguistics: A graphic guide (good reviews on Amazon)
  • William McGregor: Linguistics: an introduction. (a popular undergraduate textbook)
    
  • Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman: An Introduction to Language (a widely-used undergraduate textbook, with chapters on different areas of linguistics and exercises at the end which are easier than the Advanced level questions, but testing knowledge of language as opposed to thinking skills; plus answers at the back!)
  • 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).
  • Terrence Gordon: Linguistics for Beginners (unknown quality but could be good)
  • R. M. W. Dixon Are Some Languages Better than Others? (unknown quality but could be good)
  • Richard Hudson: Invitation to Linguistics (accessible, clear, and with a focus on linguistic puzzles)
  • Personal recommendations from Babette Verhoeven, one of our main puzzle-writers:
    • David J. Peterson – The Art of Language Invention – Peterson is a “conlanger” – he constructs languages for film & TV – including Dothraki  & Valyrian for Game of Thrones. While I appreciate that many among us might be suspicious about conlangers, Peterson is a trained linguist and his book takes a newbie to linguistics through the basics of language study (phonology, lexis/semantics, morphology & syntax, diachronic change, etc.) in a very accessible (and dare I say it, fun) way.
    • Guy Deutscher’s popular linguistics books are great too:
      • Through the Looking Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (the title is misleading – it is much more nuanced, based on recent linguistic relativity research presented in an accessible manner)
      • The Unfolding of Language: The Evolution of Mankind’s Greatest Invention (again, very accessible)
    • Daniel Everett – Language: The Cultural Tool (his most accessible and linguistically focused book, I think)
    • John McWhorter –
      • What Language Is: And What It Isn’t And What It Could Be (nice general introduction through looking at a wide range of different languages including slang)
      • The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language (again the title suggests a very strong anti-relativism stance, but the book is measured and sets out to tackle the more popular, non-expert myths about Eskimo’s different perception of snow because they have so many different words for it etc.)
    • There’s some nice TED talks, too:
      • John McWhorter has done a few
      • Lera Boroditsky: how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think
      • Patricia Kuhl:  child language acquisition, which is a nice way into linguistics:
    • My favourite blog and Youtube Channel is: 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.
• See if your school subscribes to Babel (a school magazine about language) or its kid sister, Lingo. If it does, read some past copies; if not, recommend Babel and Lingo to your language teacher or your librarian.
• Take a look at some entertaining and interesting blogs about linguistics:
  • ‘Humans who read grammars’, specially for and by young linguists
  • the Language Log, written by a team of leading researchers
  • the official International Linguistics Olympiad blog for questions and answers about linguistics
• Browse around in
  • Gretchen McCulloch’s lovely website
  • the free online Unravelling magazine about language and linguistics, written by students for students
• Write an essay for a prize in:
  • the Trinity College Cambridge essay competition
  • the Babel Magazine essay competition.
• Do a BA in linguistics at uni.
• Download the Quizup app (the one by Plain Vanilla Games), and go to Topics > Science > Linguistics > Ranking. You can compete in a pub-quiz style competition about linguistics either nationally or internationally (choose the button at the bottom). Good luck!