Preparation for International Linguistics Olympiad [Preparation Guideline]

Hello readers! I’m Liam McKnight from the UK, and I’ve taken part in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) for the past three years.

In this post, I’ll share some of the ways I’ve found useful for preparing for a linguistics olympiad at any level, which hopefully will, in turn, be useful to you!

Linguistics Olympiads don’t require any knowledge of linguistic theory, nor are they about how many languages or know, or how well you know them. Most of the time, you’ll be given data such as phrases or sentences in a language you don’t know and probably have never heard of, and then you’ll be asked to translate more sentences using that data, or to explain some feature or structure in the language. Other types of questions include working out the number system in a different language or decoding an orthography which could work entirely differently to your own language’s writing system.

1. Practice
Generally, participants who do well are those who have either participated in olympiads before or have practiced different questions from previous Olympiads. That’s not to say you can’t do well without prior experience - it’s more than knowing what types of questions can come up, as well as how languages tend to “work,” can be really useful.

Some linguistics problems may also require you to write a formal explanation of how the grammar of the language in the question works - in these cases, it’s (almost) never necessary to write down how you actually worked out your conclusions, but you will need to lay out clearly and concisely a set of rules which should allow you to explain any of the sentences or phrases in the question. Even if you’re not required to submit an explanation, writing down the structure you’ve worked out in rough can be a helpful way of working out any more translations you need to do or catching any mistakes you’ve made.

2. Keeping an Open Mind
The way your native language (or languages) structure themselves and view the world is not necessarily the same as the way any other language works - in linguistics problems, it’s very likely that some aspect or aspects will be entirely different. For example, some languages require that each time you state something, you must also state how you know it - whether it’s something you’ve seen yourself, or heard from someone else, or only inferred from evidence (this is known as evidentiality). Other languages distinguish different types of possession - whether it’s an “inalienable” possession, like a part of the body, or an “alienable” object that you own, like a car. When solving questions, try to consider all the different information that a phrase or sentence might encode, and then make sure you include it all in your answers.

3. How Languages Work
This ties into both points above - with practice, you’ll be able to recognize roughly what kinds of features languages are likely to have. For example, this might be things like which bases are more common than others in number questions (5, 10, 12 and 20 are more common; bases like 7 and 13 are unheard of). This can be done through practice or through reading about linguistics generally - no knowledge of linguistics is ever required, but knowing about certain features or terminology can help you organize your thoughts more clearly. There’s a great list of resources for this at http://www.uklo.org/for-competitors, and WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures) is a database of language features found at http://wals.info/.

However, more important than all this is that you just have a go at some questions! Even just trying two or three questions to get an idea of what the competition involves will be a huge advantage.

Other Resources:

Team UK at IOL 2016: Samuel, Liam, and Isobel

IOL website with past problems (very hard): www.ioling.org
The IOL website also has links to every country’s national Olympiad if you want to try some in different languages.

National Olympiads: 

http://www.uklo.org/ (UK); http://nacloweb.org/ (North America);  http://plo-in.org/ (India);  https://ailo.adaptcentre.ie/ (Ireland)
Tips for linguistics problems by UK competitor Ellie Warner that go into a lot more detail (the last three are more specific to IOL)

About the Author

Liam McKnight is from Magdalene College School, Oxford. Here's a history Liam's participation in IOL: Blageovgrad 2015 (6th position, Gold), Mysore 2016 (3rd position, Gold), Dublin 2017 (3rd position, Gold).

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