Over 250 second level students all over Ireland are taking the first round paper of the CNGL All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO) in their own schools on Wednesday 3 February 2010.

Following the success of last year's inaugural AILO competition, CNGL invited transition-year, 5th- and 6th-year students in Ireland and Northern Ireland with an interest in languages and good analytical skills to put them together, learn about linguistics, and participate in this fun competition. The winners of the overall AILO individual competition will represent Ireland at the International Linguistics Olympiad in Sweden in July 2010.

Many disciplines such as science, maths, creative writing, and music run competitions to find the most promising young students. A Linguistics Olympiad involves face-to-face competition where teams or individuals have to use their ingenuity, creativity and skill to solve language-related problems. No specialist linguistics knowledge is assumed.

23 schools from the republic and north signed up to take part in this year’s competition. The first individual round consists of six questions of varying difficulty, to be answered in 2½-hours. Individuals who score above a threshold will be invited to participate in the AILO final (individual and team competitions) to be held on March 24th in the Hub at Dublin City University (DCU). A CNGL researcher will provide a training session on solving the linguistics problems in their own school prior to the final in DCU.

Who runs it?

The All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad is organised by the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), an Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)-funded research  centre based in Dublin City University, involving three other universities (UCD, TCD and UL) and nine industry partners (Alchemy, IBM, Microsoft, SDL, SpeechStorm, Symantec ,Traslán, VistaTEC, and DNP Japan).