International Linguistics Olympiad success for Perse student

Tom (Upper Sixth) broke the language barrier to earn a top 10 finish and a gold medal at the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) in Taiwan.

Representing the UK at the IOL following his success in the national Olympiad, Tom came an impressive ninth overall in a field of almost 230 participants from across the world.

He was the highest-placed of the eight British competitors in Taipei and was one of just 15 entrants to claim a gold medal for achieving a score of more than 80%.

Tom said: “I am very happy with how I did overall. I didn’t find the questions any harder than the UK Linguistics Olympiad, but I did a lot of practice in the time between the Olympiads.”

The individual element of the IOL saw participants face five questions over a six-hour period, beginning with a problem based on two number systems used in the Bhutanese language of Dzongkha.

Tough translation tasks based on Gaahmg, spoken in Sudan, and Kuria, of Kenya and Tanzania, followed with Tom admitting the tonal nature of both languages provided additional challenges to finding the solutions.

However, the most difficult problem for Tom was a semantic match-up of English and the Papua New Guinean language of Kewa.

He said: “New Guinean languages often have unique features not found anywhere else in the world. This one had a feature where a category of things was referred to by two things in that category, so for example the word for ‘animals’ was ‘pig-dog’. The part I found the hardest was that the words for fire and tree happened to be identical and I didn’t manage to spot this during the exam.”

Rounding off the exam was a question on psycholinguistics (analysing how the brain interacts with language) comparing English with the Guatemalan tongue of Kaqchikel, based on a research paper that investigated whether there was a universal preferred word order.

Beside his solo success, Tom also helped the UK clinch the award for the team with the highest individual average scores with 69.94%.

There was still time for Tom and the team to soak up their surroundings, as they visited a Buddhist temple and the National Palace Museum, travelled up a mountain on a cable car and looked around Taipei’s night markets.

He said: “I really enjoyed the whole experience, getting to meet lots of like-minded people from all over the world and seeing the sights of Taipei.

“I learned a lot of interesting linguistics while I was preparing for the competition at home, and in Taiwan, I enjoyed learning about their culture and history.”