The Linguistics Olympiads—Academic competitions in linguistics for secondary school students Ivan Derzhanski and Thomas Payne 1. Introduction Since the mid-1960s, competitions in linguistics for secondary school students have been taking place at various locations around the world. In Russia, the Moscow and St Petersburg Linguistic Olympiads are credited with inspiring hundreds of young talented scholars to choose linguistics as an academic major and profession. Presently (2007) there are national contests in Bulgaria, the Netherlands and several other European countries, and the USA. There is also an International Linguistic Olympiad in which students from many countries compete, as well as dozens of local competitions held in individual towns and schools across Europe and the USA. In this article we will describe the basic Linguistic Olympiad (LO) concept, and will argue for its significance for Linguistics and related fields on a number of levels. Following this we will provide specific descriptions of how the LO concept has been implemented in Russia, Bulgaria, the USA and internationally. 2. The Genius of LO At the heart of the LO concept is the self-sufficient linguistic problem, a unique genre of composition that presents linguistic facts and phenomena in enigmatic form. A steady supply of original, thoughtfully created and intriguing problems is absolutely necessary for the success of any ongoing LO programme. In a typical “live” competition, students are given several hours to solve a set of problems, many of which involve data from languages the students have never heard of, whilst others may highlight little-known features of commonly known languages or formal representations of natural languages. Good LO problems require the solver to apply a formal style of thought familiar from the hard sciences to the realm of linguistic data, including orthographies, sounds, words and sentences. The most successful problem solvers are able to “get inside” the minds of speakers of unfamiliar languages to discover new ways of thinking and categorizing the universe, and in so doing ultimately to develop an appreciation for both the unity of language and the diversity of languages. Students come to view a language as a system built upon complex but logical and consistent principles rather than as a frustrating collection of impenetrable facts, as lessons in “grammar” so often present. This fusion of formal logic and cross-cultural thinking makes the problems attractive and profitable for mathematicians and language enthusiasts alike. 1 They bridge the “techie”/”fuzzy” divide that so characterizes an increasingly specialized academic culture. For everyone there is also the appeal of the ludic element—the challenge of the puzzle, the same motivation that accounts for the popularity of crosswords, cryptograms, Sūdoku and the like. Finally, they offer a chance to communicate a little, as it were, with worlds located far away in space or time by getting to know something about their languages, and to gain new and sometimes startling perspectives on the languages that the solver is already familiar with. Here is a good example of a problem that exposes students to different cultural worlds, from the 16 th Moscow LO (1979): 1 The word “mathematics” (or “mathematical”) that often appears in the full names of LOs highlights the fact that the gist of this activity is finding structures, regularities and correspondences (which is what mathematics is all about), rather than knowing languages (which is what linguistics amounts to, according to a popular misconception).