8th International Olympiad in Linguistics has ended and the winners have been announced

Stockholm, Sweden, 30 July 2010

The eighth International Olympiad in Linguistics (IOL) took place in Stockholm, Sweden, from the 19th to the 24th of July 2010.

There were 3 gold medals, 9 silver and 15 bronze. The gold medals went to Vadim Tukh from Russia (Saint Petersburg), Andrey Nikulin Russia (Moscow) and Ben Sklaroff USA (Team Red).

In the team contest, Latvia obtained the first prize, Russia (Moscow) came second, and Poland (team 2) third. USA (team Blue) was awarded a separate cup for scoring the highest average number of points at the individual contest. The participants selected problem #3 (Blissymbolics) by Alexander Piperski as the best problem at the individual contest. The detailed results can be viewed on IOL-8’s website.

IOL-8 was hosted by the non-profit youth organisation Young Scientists Stockholm. 99 young secondary school students from all over the world came to Stockholm to take part, 26 teams from 18 countries participated. Two of these, Norway and Singapore, took part in the event for the first time. The Local Organizing Committee was chaired by Hedvig Skirgård from Young Scientists Stockholm and the Jury by Alexander Piperski from Moscow State University.

The IOL is one of twelve scientific Olympiads, and is an annual international competition for students of secondary schools requiring them to solve, individually and in teams, linguistic problems. The competition requires no special knowledge, only familiarity with such fundamental concepts from language, linguistics and mathematics as are typically present in school curricula, as well as general cultural knowledge and logical thought.

The International Problem Committee, headed by Alexander Piperski, prepared a set of six problems for the event. Five of these, featuring Budukh, Drehu, Romansh, Genetic Code and Blissymbolics, were assigned to the individual participants on July 20. Each of the 99 participants had 6 hours to work on these problems. On July 22, the team contest, which lasted 4 hours, involved the decoding of a collection of dictionary defintions written entirely in Mongolian, with no clues other than the appearances of a few international words (kilogram, atom) and the repetitive structure of dictionary defintions. All the problems can be downloaded from IOL-8's website: www.iol.nu

USA and Slovenia have put in bids to host future IOL. More information about next years competition can be found at t www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu

Additional information:
Hedvig Skigård
hedvig ( at ) iol.nu
www.iol.nu