The International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) is а student competition for secondary school students from the International Science Olympiads. Its abbreviation, IOL, is deliberately chosen not to correspond to the name of the organization in any particular language so that member organizations can choose for themselves how to designate the competition in their own language. This olympiad furthers the fields of mathematical, theoretical, and descriptive linguistics.
Format The setup differs from most other Science Olympiads in that the olympiad contains both individual and team contests. The individual contest consists of five problems covering the main fields of theoretical, mathematical and applied linguistics – phonetics, morphology, semantics, syntax, sociolinguistics, etc. – which must be solved in six hours. Since the second IOL, the team contest has consisted of one extremely difficult and time-consuming problem. Teams, which generally consist of four students, are given three to four hours to solve it. Like nearly all International Science Olympiads, its problems are translated and completed in several languages and as such must be written free of any native language constraints. However, unlike other olympiads, the translations are provided by the multilingual Problem Committee, a body of experts independent of the delegates' team leaders. Because competitors could gain an advantage if they are familiar with the language groups that are the subject of some of the assignments, problems are increasingly based on some of the world's lesser-known languages. Fortunately, with over 6,000 languages spoken worldwide (not including the so-called dead languages), there are plenty to choose from. Artificial languages and writing systems have been used in previous problems, and certain problems have been based on patterned systems not usually considered language, such as mRNA or barcodes, further increasing the range of choice. The presence of an independent Problem Committee and Jury means that team leaders do not have to be experts in the field (though most are): they can (and often do) work closely with their teams, providing last-minute coaching throughout the week of the competition. In any case, the most helpful ability is analytic and deductive thinking, as all solutions must include clear reasoning and justification.
History The concept of self-sufficient linguistics problems was formulated in the 1960s, in the intellectual environment of the recently founded Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (OTiPL) of the Moscow State University. Moscow linguists in this environment were specially interested in understanding and modelling the formal and mathematical aspects of the natural languages; they were hatching things like the meaning-text theory, the Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics and the beginnings of what later became computational linguistics. In 1963, Andrey Zaliznyak published a book called Linguistics problems (Лингвистические задачи), explaining in the introduction:
Specially crafted problems can serve as an important tool for teaching the fundamental principles and methods of linguistics. In existing collections, the material used for problems is often drawn from the facts of students' native language or the most well-known European languages. While such tasks are undoubtedly beneficial, they often suffer from the disadvantage that it is challenging to separate the linguistic task itself (which requires nothing but understanding the basic linguistic principles) from testing specific knowledge of the language under consideration. The best (though not the only) way to get rid of that second element, which doesn't directly relate to general linguistics, is to create tasks based on material from languages unfamiliar to the students. Of course, it is more challenging to craft such problems, since all the essential specific facts necessary for solving the task must somehow be presented in the problem data. However, in this case, students only need an understanding of the properties of language in general. Following the publication, the then-student Alfred Zhurinsky proposed to the mathematics professor Vladimir Uspensky the creation of a high-school olympiad using such problems.
Thus, in 1965, the first edition of the Moscow's Traditional Olympiad on Linguistics and Mathematics was held, with an Organizing Committee composed of Uspensky (president), Igor Miloslavsky, Alexander Kibrik and Anna Polivanova. The Problem Committee consisted of Zhurinsky (the author of most of the problems) and Zaliznyak, plus Boris Gorodetsky (president), Alexandra Raskina and Victor Raskin. The Moscow Olympiad was held regularly until 1982 and resumed again in 1988, being still held nowadays. In the next decades, olympiads using the format of self-sufficient linguistics problems started to appear in different regions:
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