The third Isle of Man Linguistics Olympiad took place recently, with sixth-form students pitted against each other to complete a test paper written by an international committee of linguists.
 
The Olympiad aims to inspire young linguists and language students to develop analytical and problem solving skills, enhance their language and communication skills and encourage them to find out more about language structure and grammatical concepts.
 
These skills are vital in careers such as e-business, the fastest growing economic sector in the Isle of Man, intelligence and security as well as translation and interpretation.
 
Forty-two students took part in the Olympiad solving such problems as: questions based on the mutation system of combination nouns in Japanese; analysis of pronouns and cases in the Australian language Murrinhpatha; calculation of semantic relationships in a bot-generated artificial language; and interpretation of Georgian script to find features of the verbs and nouns.
 
“The competition paper, set in the UK and marked by Max Wheeler, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, tested the students’ skills to an exceptional degree across a range of linguistic concepts and systems.  The excellent results compare well to those achieved by students at schools in the UK.  The organisers would like to thank the schools for all their help in running the competition, and all the students who took part,” said Rob Teare, who organises the Isle of Man’s participation in the International Linguistics Olympiad.

The four students with the highest scores – Daniel Quayle, Annie Lennon, Max Quayle and Dylan Leonine – have been selected to represent the Isle of Man at the International Linguistics Olympiad in Bulgaria this year. 
 
Each year teams of young linguists from around the world gather to test their minds against the world’s toughest puzzles in language and linguistics.
 
Daniel, who is a fluent Manx speaker and competed with the Isle of Man team last year in Beijing, said: “We are looking forward to representing the Island again in Bulgaria at the International Olympiad.  Last year was a challenge competing with 28 countries and over 150 contestants, on a series of diverse linguistic problems.