[Lingtyp] Creating problems for linguistic olympiads

[Lingolympiad-Hedvig]

Dear linguists of the world,

My name is Hedvig Skirgård and I’m a member of the board of the
International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) and PhD student of linguistics at
ANU, Canberra. I’d like to tell you about linguistic olympiads and invite
you all as linguists to participate in creating interesting linguistic
puzzles for our participants and help spread linguistics to the youth of
the world.

Linguistic Olympiads are arranged all over the world and traces its roots
back to 1965 in Moscow. The goal is to make secondary school students
interested in linguistics and languages by solving linguistic problems and
getting training in linguistics. The contests look quite different in the
different countries, but every year we come together for the international
contest. The problems our participants solve in the contests are based on
real phenomena in the world of languages and linguistics, and from all
areas of our field of study. The participants are secondary school students
and because of this we posit no prior explicit knowledge of linguistics,
but the problems are not entirely based on logic either. We are
particularly interested in puzzles based on lesser known languages. I
highly encourage you to look at some examples at ioling.org and I’ve
attached the English (US) version of the problem set for the individual
contest last year in Beijing for your benefit.

The contest is very popular, we're growing all the time and it attracts
very passionate young people who are interested in languages and
linguistics. They do not only broaden their horizons by meeting each other,
but also by facing interesting phenomena in actual languages from all over
the world.

What many of these contests need are more ideas for problems, further help
creating the problems and sometimes also help in linguistics training for
the participants. This is where you as linguists can be helpful, without
necessarily involving yourselves in the entire organisation of the
contests. If you have any suggestions or would be able to assist as an
advisor to a local contest, please contact the IOL via this form and we
will relay correspondence:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ueMf7C438bn7YqYftqQ-xlPpnzuaWjRHpe4xVo4oUMI/viewform

There exists stable organisations for linguistic olympiads in several
countries, but we also have some that are just starting up or that have
just begun correspondence with us about entering.  These are the countries
that have an IOL-accredited linguistic olympiad: Australia, Brazil,
Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, India, Ireland,
Isle of Man, Latvia, Netherlands, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Russia,
Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, UK, Ukraine and the USA.

These are the countries that have had contact with us, but have not yet
been accredited fully: Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Denmark, Egypt, Finland,
France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan,
Kenya, Lithuania, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Serbia, Singapore, Turkey,
Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

Countries that share a language can collaborate, the English contests
currently do but this is of course also possible for the countries of the
Francophonie and other sets of countries that share language, or have
closely related languages. This is entirely up to the local contests.

You are of course also most welcome to contact us regarding starting up a
contest in a country that has not yet been in contact with us.

Feel free to spread this message wherever you think is useful.

All the best,
Hedvig

p.s. Interesting information about the linguistic diversity of the contest
itself: in the national contests participants typically only compete in one
language, however in the international contest participants compete in
different languages (i.e. receive the problem set in different languages).
This year there will be 16 (Bulgarian Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian,
French, Hungarian, Japanese, Latvian, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese,
Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian).
Participants are not required to speak English, however we need at least
one of the accompanying adult team leaders to known English or the major
language of the country where the IOL is currently being held. If you’d
like to know more about this, please visit this blog post:
http://international-linguistics-olympiad.blogspot.nl/2014/08/all-problems-from-iol-2014-are-up.html
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