Linguistics at School: The UK Linguistics Olympiad
Abstract
The UK Linguistics Olympiad, like similar olympiads that have been offered in other
countries since they first took place in Moscow in 1965, is an annual competition in
which school students test their ability to sort out the underlying patterns and rules in
linguistic data. The UK olympiad has only existed since 2010 but by 2012 it already had
2,000 competitors aged between 11 and 18. Its success shows how enthusiastic young
people can be about studying language structure. Linguistics olympiads help schools to
promote languages and to interest all pupils in language structure; in the UK, this is
particularly important in state-funded schools.
1. What is a linguistics olympiad?
As its title suggests, a linguistics olympiad (LO) is a competition which ranks
competitors in terms of how good they are at thinking like linguists, but since they are all
school students, LOs are primarily a means of promoting linguistics at school level.
Professional practitioners of linguistics would rightly object to any suggestion that they
themselves might be ranked competitively, but at school level it is both possible and
extremely productive. The aim of this article is to explain in more detail how LOs work,
with the UK olympiad as an example, and to explore the reasons for the UK’s success
in this area.
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The LO movement follows the path which has already been established for
mathematics and some of the physical sciences, and which is embodied at the
international level by a dozen competitions ranging from the International Mathematical
Olympiad to the International Astronomy Olympiad (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Science_Olympiad). Generally, the competition
tests the mental skills and knowledge found in the corresponding school subject, but
some subjects, including linguistics, are not taught at school so the olympiads cannot
assume any ‘technical’ knowledge. In the case of linguistics, this principle rules out not
only questions on the grand issues that divide us at a research level, but also technical
notations and tools of analysis such as syntactic trees or the International Phonetic
Alphabet. Although these exclusions are important, they actually leave a vast amount of
relatively concrete but challenging material which is perfect for a school-level
competition.
The best way to explain LOs is through examples of past test questions, such as
those in the 2012 test paper for the Foundation level of the UKLO. (See also Derzhanski
and Payne 2010 for more examples. The notion of ‘levels’ of difficulty will be explained
in the next section.) This paper can be found on the UKLO website together with the
complete version of all the Foundation-level questions, their authors, their solutions and
(in some cases) a commentary (see http://www.uklo.org/?page_id=1213). In every
question, the starting point is a collection of raw data, typically (though not necessarily)
from a very unfamiliar language. The tasks require students to go beyond these raw
data by working out the underlying patterns and then performing some kind of test of
their understanding. We start with Question 1, on Yolmo.
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1. Being with it in Yolmo (5 marks)
Yolmo is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nepal by around 10,000 people. The
sentences below come from a small dialect spoken by around 500 people in the district
of Lamjung. The characters
and
represent sounds like ‘t’ or ‘d’ but with the tongue-tip
curled back. Below is a list of sentences in Lamjung Yolmo with their English
translations.
ngà ngàki ádzi nyímu lú lènke
I sing a song with my sister
ngà ngàki kéeki lú lènke
I sing a song with my voice
ngà ángaki kwèla nyòke
I buy clothes with money
ngà ngàki áma nyímu kwèla nyòke
I buy clothes with my mother
ngà ngàki kángbaki òke
I walk with my legs
ngà ngàki khí nyímu òke
I walk with my dog
ngà ngàki làkpaki tó sake
I eat rice with my hand
Question 1. (Write your answers on the separate answer sheet.)
What do the following Yolmo words or phrases mean?
a. ngà
b. áma
c. òke
d. kwèla nyòke
e. ngàki kéeki
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Translate the following into Yolmo:
f. I eat rice with my sister.
g. I buy clothes with my dog. (Hint: Assume that I exchange my dog for the clothes.)
In this case, the test is to translate in both directions by translating individual
words or phrases from Yolmo to English, and whole sentences in the other direction.
This question is meant to be at the easy end of the scale of difficulty, but it requires
careful analytical skills which some young people have and others lack. One of its
challenges is the use of diacritics and special characters, which takes monoglot English
speakers well outside their comfort zone.
Question 2 is about a much less ‘exotic’ language, Danish, but requires a fairly
sophisticated semantic analysis in which competitors must realize that Danish counts
some numbers on the base of twenty rather than ten, and names some numbers as
‘halfway’ to the next twenty-based number. For example, they have to analyze
syvoghalvtreds (meaning ‘57’) as ‘7 plus halfway to 3 x 20’. Once again the task for
competitors is to go beyond the basic data by translating in both directions.
2. Danish numbers (5 marks)
Here are some examples of Danish numbers:
3 = tre
4 = fire
4
5 = fem
6 = seks
7 = syv
20 = tyve
30 = tredive
40 = fyrre
57 = syvoghalvtreds
60 = tres
78 = otteoghalvfjerds
80 = firs
Question 2. (Write your answers on the separate answer sheet.)
Express the following Danish numbers in figures:
a. treogtyve
b. seksoghalvtreds
c. fireogtres
d. femoghalvfjerds
e. syvoghalvfems
What is the Danish for these figures:
f. 8
g. 27
h. 36
5
i. 65
j. 98
Question 3 has two variants, one of which is Welsh (shown below). Since some
schools are in Welsh-speaking areas, or teach Welsh, teachers can choose Dutch
instead. The Welsh problem is based on the bilingual leaflet about libraries shown in
Figure 1, while the Dutch one (not shown here) presents a list of verbs with their past
participles. Both problems are considerably more difficult than the first two because they
call for an analysis of general rules, namely one case of soft mutation in Welsh, and
several morphophonological rules in Dutch.
3w. Welsh libraries (10 marks)
Below is a leaflet in Welsh, with English translations, about the library service in the
Welsh county Gwynedd. Use the leaflet to answer the questions about Welsh.
Question 3w. (Write your answers on the separate answer sheet.)
What is the Welsh for the following?
1. books
2. library (give two alternatives)
3. libraries
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4. Wales
5. Gwynedd (give two alternatives)
6. within
7. large
8. computers (give two alternatives)
9. requests
10. book
11. free books
12. large magazine
13. within Gwynedd
14. on computers
15. any books
(INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE)
Question 4 is about Haitian, and concerns the choice of forms for ‘the’. The
challenge for competitors is, first, to realise that the choice of forms in the singular is
based on phonology alone (not, say, gender), and secondly to work out the fairly
complex phonological conditioning rules. For a pupil who knows no phonetics or
phonology, this is a real challenge.
4. Haitian (10 marks)
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Haitian Creole is a language spoken by about 10 million people in Haiti. It is based
largely on French and some African languages. In the spelling, the combinations an, en,
and on denote nasal vowels. The table below contains nouns in Haitian Creole
combined with definite articles, meaning ‘the’. The English translation is just for the noun
itself; so kòl la means ‘the necktie’, and kòl means ‘necktie’.
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kòl la
necktie
jaden an
garden
lanp lan
lamp
kouto yo
knives
mayi a
maize
lanmou an
love
ri a
street
pant lan
slope
manman an
mother
kabann nan
bed
sant yo
odours
lèt la
letter
sans lan
sense
telefòn nan
telephone
kò a
body
mi an
wall
fanm nan
woman
joumou an
pumpkin
ban an
bench, ban
kay la
house
fanmi an
family
pon an
bridge
liv yo
books
dam nan
lady
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Question 4. (Write your answers on the separate answer sheet.)
Provide the words represented by ‘?’ in the table below.
1
lalin ?
the moon
2
pitimi ?
the millet
3
muzik ?
the music
4
maldamou ?
the love-sickness
5
kap ?
the kite
6
radyo ?
the radio
7
vant ?
the belly
8
tan ?
the time
9
?
the knife
10
?
the bodies
11
?
the odour
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?
the book
The last question is about the inflectional morphology of Esperanto. This requires
a very sophisticated semantic analysis in which a ‘past-present-future’ contrast applies
both to the deictic time and to a secondary time, each realized at a different place in the
verb’s morphology. Another complication is that these tense contrasts combine with a
voice contrast between active and passive. Like many of the harder questions, this
favours language-literate students who have some experience thinking about tense and
voice; but in principle it can be solved from scratch by good pattern-spotters who can
think independently. As mentioned earlier, the LO only tests analytical thinking skills, so
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it only presupposes the knowledge of language that may be expected of any school
pupil; but in the UK, the fact is that some schools teach a lot more grammar than others
do, so those who know about grammar are at an advantage.
5. Esperanto (15 marks)
Esperanto is an artificial language created by Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof in 1887 and
designed for international communication. Estimates of the number of active and fluent
speakers range from 100,000 to 2,000,000 people all around the world, with a few
hundred native speakers. The letters ‘ĝ’ and ‘ĉ’ are pronounced like ‘g’ and ‘ch’ in the
words ‘gem’ and ‘chase’.
Here are some Esperanto sentences translated into English.
1. La kapro manĝintas.
The goat has eaten.
2. La hundo ĉasis la katon.
The dog chased the cat.
3. La kapro manĝis.
The goat ate.
4. La kapro manĝitos.
The goat will have been eaten.
5. La kapron ĉasintis la hundo.
The dog had chased the goat.
6. La kapro manĝas.
The goat eats.
7. La kapro manĝotas.
The goat is going to be eaten.
8. La kato manĝantas.
The cat is eating.
9. La kapro manĝontis.
The goat was going to eat.
10. La kapro manĝintos.
The goat will have eaten.
11. La kato ĉasas la hundon.
The cat chases the dog.
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Question 5. (Write your answers on the separate answer sheet.)
Translate the following sentences into English:
1. La kapro manĝontos.
2. La kapro manĝitas.
3. La kato ĉasitis.
Translate the following sentences into Esperanto:
4. The goat was eating.
5. The dog is being eaten.
6. The dog will chase the goat.
The problems can be very much harder than this. For one thing, as the difficulty
across competition levels increases, more emphasis is put on providing not only correct
answers, but also a correct and clear formulation of the underlying rules; and for
another, the solutions become increasingly hard to find. For instance, the hardest
question in the 2012 UK competition was undoubtedly the Advanced-level one about
the script called Phags-pa created on the orders of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan
and exemplified in a two-page extract of a poem (shown in Figure 2 below). This was
accompanied by a transcription of the same poem, which is less helpful than might at
first be assumed because the poem in Phags-pa script is just part of the transcribed
poem. Worse still, it’s not at all clear how the lines and rows of the two versions match
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up. Very few of even the brightest of the UK competitors found their way into this
problem.
(INSERT FIGURE 2 HERE)
These examples illustrate the main characteristics of a linguistics olympiad, as a
test of competitors’ ability to think analytically about raw linguistic data-sets. Both the
data and the tasks will remind any linguistics lecturer of homework problems they set for
their students, so there is no doubt that they involve linguistics; but the crucial difference
is that the competitors are not university students, but school pupils.
2. The UK Linguistics Olympiad
The UK’s LO is by no means unique, being one of about two dozen national olympiads
in linguistics, and in section 3 its place in both historical and geographical context will be
discussed. Like every other national olympiad its peculiarities reflect those of the
country. The relevant facts about the UK are that it is a relatively small but prosperous
country with an extremely diverse school system and weak state funding for noncurriculum events such as olympiads. As we shall see, all these characteristics are
relevant to the LO. However, although the UK olympiad cannot be described as a
‘typical’ national olympiad, the concrete details about our organisation may be more
helpful than more abstract generalisations that might apply across all olympiads.
We would like to focus on five distinctive characteristics of the UKLO:
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●
its recent creation and rapid growth
●
the dominance of fee-paying schools
●
the wide age-range of competitors
●
the use of university students to mark scripts
●
the use of sponsors rather than state funding.
The UK is a relative newcomer to the LO scene, having only officially started in
2010 after a trial run in 2009 as guests of the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (see
http://www.cngl.ie/ailo/index.html), which was a very helpful introduction. We also
benefited greatly from the existence in the UK of a well-established and recognised
Committee for Linguistics in Education, which represents two professional associations
for academic linguistics (the Linguistics Association of Great Britain and the British
Association for Applied Linguistics) as well as a large number of other associations with
an interest in language education (see http://clie.org.uk/). This committee was able to
constitute a sub-committee to run the UKLO, so our committee has an official status
which is helpful in dealing with potential sponsors (an important part of our activity).
Over the years, the committee has grown and now has twenty members, each with a
specialised role (see http://www.uklo.org/?page_id=29). This large committee is
important because almost all the members have full-time jobs so they can only give
limited time to UKLO. The committee is very diverse in terms of occupation (university
or school), age (recent graduate to retired), and expertise (in finance, publicity,
organisation, technology or simply education).
One of the distinctive characteristics of UKLO is our very rapid growth. In our first
year (2010) we had 562 competitors – a number which surprised us – but this rose to
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1165 in 2011 and to 1912 in 2012. Clearly the competition is meeting a need. We have
also been able to use a number of existing professional networks to advertise the LO,
and to build a list of school teachers who have expressed an interest in it and who act
as our links to schools that provide our competitors (for registered schools, see
http://www.uklo.org/?page_id=596). The main value of this list is to provide a channel
for emails through which we can not only announce organisational details, but also
invite feedback from teachers; indeed, it is through this list that we have recruited some
of our committee members.
What kind of teachers do we attract? The largest single category consists of
foreign-language teachers in state-funded schools, and there is no doubt that we have
benefited from the fact that such teachers are well networked, thanks to an effective
professional association (Association for Language Learning; see http://www.alllanguages.org.uk/) and a government-funded network (see
https://www.routesintolanguages.ac.uk/), both of which have been supportive of the LO.
However, we have also benefited from the equally effective networking for foreignlanguage teachers in fee-paying schools, as well as a large email list for teachers of the
examination in English Language taken at ‘Advanced level’, i.e., in the last two years
before university. In addition to teachers of foreign languages and English Language,
we have recruited smaller numbers of teachers from classics, mathematics and a
handful of other subjects.
The 300 schools that these teachers represent are equally varied, ranging from
large and distinguished fee-paying (‘public’) schools such as Manchester Grammar
School and Eton College to state-funded inner-city comprehensive schools and sixth-
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form colleges. The split between fee-paying and state-funded schools is significant in a
number of ways. On the one hand, we could be concerned about the dominance of feepaying schools at every level in the competition: competitors from fee-paying schools
outnumber those from state-funded schools three to one, even though fee-paying
schools educated only 7% of all pupils in 2010 (The Independent Schools Directory
2012). On the other hand, the pattern we see is broadly replicated in other science
olympiads. It does appear that teachers in fee-paying schools are allowed, or
encouraged, to range beyond the confines of the curriculum, while teachers in statefunded schools have less freedom, not least because of the pressures of ‘league tables’
(on which schools compete with each other). Moreover, we certainly would not have
expanded as fast as we have done without the enthusiasm of fee-paying schools, and
without their concrete support both in terms of time and money. The fact is that feepaying schools are very significant players in the UK’s educational scene, and are
highly relevant to the LO in the UK.
Another peculiarity of our LO is the broad age-range of students that we attract
thanks to an early decision to offer the competition at different levels of difficulty. The
two levels that we offered in the first two years expanded in 2012 to three levels:
Foundation, Intermediate and Advanced. Any school student may be entered at any
level, but we recommend Foundation level for Key Stage 3 (that is, Years 7-9, i.e. age
12 to 14), Intermediate for Key Stage 4 (Years 10 and 11) and Advanced for Key Stage
5 (Years 12 and 13, the last years before university). Our youngest groups of
competitors are in Year 7, which is the first year of secondary education – i.e. age 1112; and in 2012 we had 93 competitors in this age group. Many of these competitors
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work in groups rather than singly, and according to our statistics they only achieve quite
modest scores (see http://www.uklo.org/?page_id=1257), but this isn’t important. What
matters is that (according to their teachers) they enjoy the challenge and are keen for
more, so if these youngsters take part in the LO every year until they leave school (in
Year 13), they will have experienced the full olympiad seven times, not to mention any
relevant training they receive in between.
In Round 1 of our LO, competitors at different levels take different tests, but the
questions overlap considerably. From a pool of nine questions (counting the
Welsh/Dutch alternatives as a single question), each paper contains five: questions 1-5
for the Foundation paper, 3-7 for Intermediate and 5-9 for Advanced. This means that
competitors at lower levels get a taste of the next level up, and, of course, the overlap
reduces the number of questions needed – an important consideration. Another benefit
for us is that we can leave schools to mark all their own scripts (with detailed guidance
on marking) for the Foundation and Intermediate levels, leaving just the Advanced
papers for us to mark centrally – as we have to because this level selects the national
winners, the sixteen competitors who will be invited to attend Round 2, a residential
weekend where we combine some training with a further test to select the team of four
to represent the UK at the International Linguistics Olympiad (see
http://www.ioling.org/).
Marking is a serious issue for us because the scripts are handwritten so they
have to be marked by hand. The marking operation has to be financially cost-free so all
our markers are volunteers, mostly located in university linguistics departments. Some
markers volunteer as individuals, but many are students who take part in events called
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‘markathons’, where a member of staff recruits student volunteers (and in some cases
departmental colleagues) for an afternoon’s supervised marking, typically fueled by
pizzas funded by the department. This activity is not merely an effective way of marking
large numbers of scripts; it also has the important benefit of involving university students
and teachers in the olympiad, thereby generating a great deal of enthusiasm which may
pay off in the future.
The final issue is funding. Like the markers, the committee are all volunteers, but
we do have some significant expenses which we can’t avoid. The first is the residential
weekend for sixteen competitors, which is hosted by a university but heavily subsidized
by UKLO; and the second is the UK team’s visit to the International Linguistics
Olympiad. These recurrent expenses amount to about £5,000 per year. Since one of
our main aims is to recruit state-funded schools, and especially those in poor areas, we
offer the competition free to both schools and competitors, so we have to raise funds
elsewhere. Given the way that the UK funds its education system, we cannot apply to
central government so we have to rely on sponsors. Fortunately, this has not been a
serious problem as we have found generous sponsors both in the academic world –
three professional associations for linguistics and the British Academy – and among the
schools, including professional associations such as the Independent Schools Modern
Languages Association. We have been greatly encouraged by the level of generosity
and enthusiasm shown by these bodies.
To summarise, then, the UK olympiad builds on the UK’s peculiarities – its very
competitive fee-paying schools, its relatively small size (which allows a residential
weekend for all competitors at Round 2), and the enthusiasm and generosity of both
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schools and academics. However, we have not mentioned one other important fact: that
our language is English. This fact has proved crucial for solving one of the biggest
challenges of the LO, which is providing suitably challenging problems. We return to this
issue in the next section.
3. Historical and international context
As we emphasised in the previous section, the UK’s LO is a relatively new addition to
an international movement which provided the ideas and infrastructure on which we
have built. In fact, we are approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the first LO organised in
1965 in Moscow by a small group of academic linguists and mathematicians who saw
how linguistic data provided patterns which were comparable in complexity and subtlety
to those which were already used in the Mathematics Olympiad (Derzhanski and Payne
2010; see also http://www.uklo.org/?page_id=69). This project clearly suited at least
some of the local schools because it rapidly became established before generating a
similar competition based in St Petersburg and then spreading to Bulgaria and a
number of other countries in Eastern Europe. In Western Europe, only the Netherlands
adopted the idea; and although an olympiad was introduced in 1998 in Oregon (USA), it
stopped after a few years and was only relaunched in 2007 as the North American
Computational Linguistics Olympiad (Derzhanski and Payne 2010; see also
http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/).
By the early 2000s there were enough national LOs to allow international
competition. The first International Linguistics Olympiad (usually abbreviated,
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surprisingly, to IOL) was held in 2003 in Bulgaria and attracted teams from six countries:
Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, The Netherlands, and Russia. Since then the
IOL has expanded both numerically and geographically, so when the 2011 competition
was held in the USA there were competitors from 19 countries (see
http://ioling.org/history/).The UK is looking forward to hosting the 2013 IOL in
Manchester.
The international history of the LO movement reveals considerable variation from
country to country. As far as aims are concerned, the main variation is in the balance
between language and mathematics. In some countries, linguistics is closely related to
mathematics, and it is worth noting that the first LO in 1965 was guided by a
distinguished mathematician. This mathematical component often surfaces as a
concern for computational analyses such as the ordering of rules, and a general
orientation towards the formal skills that encourage hardware and software firms to offer
sponsorship. In these countries the competition’s name may include the word
computational, as in the USA’s title North American Computational Linguistics
Olympiad. In other countries, including the UK, the emphasis is much more strongly on
language structure, so we always choose problems that illustrate some general
structural characteristic of language rather than more abstract formal patterning. This
choice is driven by our general aim, which is to encourage interest in language and its
structure. It may be relevant that none of our sponsors are computer firms.
One international development which has proved particularly important for the
UK has been the English Language Computational Linguistics Olympiad (ELCLO),
which is based in the USA and organised by an American academic (with a background
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in Bulgaria), Dragomir Radev. This is a consortium of LOs in English-speaking countries
that share problems with each other. As of 2012, the countries concerned are the USA,
Canada, Australia, Ireland and the UK. Although we in the UK contribute some
problems, most of the problems that we use were created by other members of ELCLO,
which makes an enormous difference to our national competition. Without ELCLO, it
would probably have been impossible to start a competition at all, let alone to provide
the high level of stimulation and challenge that we think we offer.
4. Benefits for schools
Before focussing on linguistics, it may be worth considering why UK schools do
olympiads, or any sort of academic competitions, at all. In most subjects, school
students are not short of opportunities to test out their abilities through the public
examination system. In fact, it is often said that school students in the UK are overtested; public examinations, plus the league tables and value-added measures that go
with them, are seen to dominate the last 4 or 5 years of secondary schooling, and some
would take the view that domination by examinations is at the expense of real
education. So why take on more examinations in the form of olympiads and the like?
The answer has to be that academic competitions can provide different
challenges from public examinations -- different in that they are not so bound up with
carefully specified syllabuses, and different in that they can be more intellectually
challenging. Three decades of rising grades in the UK means that the public
examinations in most subjects are widely believed to be too easy for the most able (see
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http://tinyurl.com/dyzzg6t). Academic competitions at a national level can provide this
stretch; and at an international level they allow the very brightest school students to
measure themselves against their peers from around the world.
In linguistics, of course, part of this reasoning does not hold: linguistics is not a
school subject in the UK, though it appears, minimally, within some English Language
specifications. Furthermore, in the UK there is little formal teaching about language and
most school students know very few linguistics concepts or terminology such as ‘relative
clause’ or ‘finite’; even basic notions such as ‘syllable’ and ‘preposition’ may be
unfamiliar. So though the UKLO does provide a challenge for the most able, it is doing
much more than that: it is providing a framework, a rationale, a reward for beginning to
engage with linguistics as a discipline. Moreover, the structure that the UKLO has
evolved (in a very short time) gives scope for the young and completely inexperienced
in the Foundation paper, allows progress in the Intermediate level, and makes demands
on the most able in the Higher level and then in Round 2.
Though there is no linguistics tradition in UK schools, the success of the UK‘s LO
derives in large measure from the enthusiasm of teachers. There are clearly many
teachers who see languages as exciting, and the study of language as an inherently
interesting phenomenon. In particular there are many modern foreign language
teachers whose interests go beyond the particular languages they teach -- and who
manage to convey this to their students. Among the many positive comments from
teachers received by UKLO, the words used most frequently are ‘fun’ and ‘enjoyment’.
Perhaps it is the very fact that linguistics olympiad problems are so very different from
what students ordinarily experience in school that makes them so appealing.
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These benefits to schools are evident from the feedback that UKLO gets. More
speculative are the following thoughts.
●
Linguistics, as the scientific study of language, may cross the gender divide,
encouraging boys to take more interest in languages and girls to take more
interest in science.
●
Some familiarity with linguistics, even at an elementary level, may help with
recruitment of students to study languages. (The UK has a long-standing
problem in this area.)
●
Knowing some linguistics may enhance students’ learning of particular
languages.
●
Some knowledge of linguistics may contribute to students’ appreciation of social
and cultural diversity.
These and other issues are being investigated during 2012 in a small project funded by
the British Academy and the report will eventually be made available on the UKLO
website.
5. Benefits for linguistics
Why should academic linguists support the LO movement? Indeed, why do so many UK
linguists already support UKLO so generously and enthusiastically? We can identify two
main reasons for this enthusiasm, one more important than the other, which we
illustrate in relation to UKLO, though analogous arguments probably apply in other
countries.
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The less important reason is that the LO provides an excellent opportunity for
recruiting university students of linguistics. What young people do in an LO is pure
linguistics, exactly the kind of activity that many linguists build into their first-year
teaching; so a 12-year old who struggles with the problems that we presented in section
1 not only knows that linguistics exists, but even knows quite accurately what ‘doing
linguistics’ is like. Moreover, if that 12-year old comes back for more the following year
(as many do), then the understanding of linguistics will deepen to the point where
linguistics will eventually be included in the list of subjects that that pupil will consider
studying at university. At present, linguistics is rather a small subject in UK universities;
for instance, in 2011 linguistics graduates numbered only 980 (Ian Cushing, personal
communication), so even at their present level, without the increases that we expect,
the UKLO figures could make a significant difference to applications for degrees in
linguistics.
More important, however, is the bridge building that UKLO allows. Historically,
linguistics has been a strictly academic, university-based, subject, with virtually no
presence at school level and only a very uncertain presence outside the world of
education. Universities (and their government funders) are becoming increasingly
uncomfortable with this kind of isolation, and promote ‘outreach’ activities to bridge the
gap. UKLO is a perfect example of outreach by academics to schools. Not only did the
initiative come from academic linguists, but the activity on offer requires the expertise
that academics have; and not only do schools enjoy the service being offered, but (as
explained in section 4 above) it could help them to achieve goals that are important for
them.
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The UK Linguistics Olympiad is not, of course, the only bridge from academic
linguistics to schools that has been built even in English-speaking countries (not to
mention other countries). Examples of others include:

a residential course in the UK for bright school students called ’The Language
Detective’ taught by Trousdale and Clark (both of whom, incidentally, are
members of the UKLO committee; Clark and Trousdale 2012).

the UK course mentioned above on English Language for 17 and 18 year olds,
which has proved so popular that it has been replicated in Australia (Mulder
2007).

courses in some American schools on linguistics-as-science (Chomsky et al.
1985; Honda et al. 2010; Ginsberg et al. 2011).
Many other initiatives in this area are reported elsewhere (Wheeler 1999; Cenoz and
Hornberger 2008; Spolsky and Hult 2008; Denham and Lobeck 2010; Ellis and
McCartney 2011), but the LO provides a unique combination of direct focus on
language structure, high student involvement, wide access and (potentially) minimal
teacher involvement.
These bridges are fundamentally important for both linguistics and schools. They
remind both sides that education urgently needs linguistics: our ideas (such as
descriptivism and variation), our models (such as the IPA) and our descriptions (such as
the grammar or phonological structure of English) (Hudson 2004). But if schools are
potential ‘consumers’ of our research, this is important not only for them but also for the
linguistics departments that could provide the research, because at present very few
orientate any of their research towards schools. There are vast areas of research that
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are almost virgin territory, ranging from the development of language during the school
years to the effects of accent variation on phonics-based teaching of basic literacy.
Having potential consumers for research is important not only for personal satisfaction
but also in the search for research funding and in the measurement of ‘impact’.
A bridge between linguistics and schools could have even more profound
consequences. In linguistics it could mean that undergraduates know a great deal more
about language, about languages and even about linguistics than they do at present.
And in schools, a successful LO movement would raise a fundamental question: If
linguistics is so popular with both teachers and students, why isn’t it on the curriculum?
The LO will have established the academic credentials of linguistics as a subject with
relevance, educational benefits and student appeal. So why not teach it in school? The
main objection will clearly be the shortage of teachers with a background in linguistics,
so now is the time for more linguistics graduates to train as school teachers and also, of
course, for more linguistics to be included in degree courses in foreign languages and
English, which will for some time produce most of the relevant teachers. But even if it
starts from small beginnings, it is easy to imagine a bright future for school-level
linguistics.
Works Cited
Cenoz, Jasone, and Nancy Hornberger (eds.). 2008. Encyclopedia of language and
education, Vol. 6 Knowledge about language (2nd ed.). New York: Springer.
Chomsky, Carol, Maya Honda, Wayne O’Neil, and Chris Unger. 1985. Doing science:
constructing scientific theories as an introduction to scientific method (Scientific
26
Theory and Method Project technical report). Cambridge, MA: ETC, Harvard
Graduate School of Education.
Clark, Billy, and Graeme Trousdale. 2012. The Language Detective: a course for young
linguists. Language and Linguistics Compass 6(8). 506-516.
Denham, Kristin, and Anne Lobeck (eds). 2010. Linguistics at school: language
awareness in primary and secondary education. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Derzhanski, Ivan, and Thomas Payne. 2010. The linguistic olympiads: academic
competitions in linguistics for secondary school students. Linguistics at school:
language awareness in primary and secondary education, ed. by Kristin Denham
and Anne Lobeck, 213-226.
Ellis, Sue, and Elspeth McCartney (eds). 2011. Applied linguistics and primary school
teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ginsberg, Daniel, Maya Honda, and Wayne O’Neil. 2011. Looking beyond English:
linguistic inquiry for English language learners. Language and Linguistics
Compass 5(5). 249-264.
Gwynedd Library Service. n.d. Gwasanaeth llyfrgell/Gwynedd library service (pamphlet).
Gwynedd Council, Wales.
Honda, Maya, Wayne O’Neil, and David Pippin. 2010. On promoting linguistics literacy:
bringing language science to the English classroom. Linguistics at school:
language awareness in primary and secondary education, ed. by Kristin Denham
and Anne Lobeck, 175-188.
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Hudson, Richard. 2004. Why education needs linguistics (and vice versa). Journal of
Linguistics 40. 105-130.
The Independent Schools Directory. 2012. UK Independent Schools Directory.  2012.
Prospects Services Ltd. Retrieved 28 September 2012 from
http://www.independentschools.com/uk/.
Mulder, Jean. 2007. Establishing linguistics in secondary education in Victoria,
Australia. Language and Linguistics Compass 1(3). 133-154.
Spolsky, Bernard, and Francis M. Hult (eds). 2008. The handbook of educational
linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
West, Andrew. 2006. Phags-pa script: Baijiaxing Mengguwen. Retrieved 3 October
2010 from http://www.babelstone.co.uk/phags-pa/baijiaxing.html.
Wheeler, Rebecca S. (ed). 1999. Language alive in the classroom. Westport, CT:
Praeger.
Selected Websites
All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad: http://www.cngl.ie/ailo/index.html
Association for Language Learning: http:///www.all.languages.org/uk/
Committee for Linguistics in Education: http://clie.org.uk/
International Linguistics Olympiad: http://www.ioling.org/
North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad: http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/
Routes into Language: https://www.routesintolanguages.ac.uk/
UK Linguistics Olympiad (UKLO): http://www.uklo.org/
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Figure 1. Bilingual pamphlet for the Welsh problem (Gwynedd Library Service n.d.)
29
Figure 2. Extract from poem in Phags-pa script (West 2006)
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