Students vie for gold at linguistic Olympics

Picking up where Vancouver left off, top school students from around the country will push their brains to the limit when they compete in a linguistics Olympiad at UQ next week.

The third Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) will hold its state and national rounds at University's St Lucia campus on Wednesday, March 24.

Around 500 high school students from years 9 to 12 are expected to participate in various locations across the country. Almost 90 students from 14 different Queensland schools will compete at UQ.

Swapping the ski slopes and running track for pens and paper, students will tackle problems such as deciphering an ancient script, solving tasks in Mayan hieroglyphs or looking for language patterns in Swahili.

The chair of the Queensland local organising committee and UQ Lecturer in Linguistics, Dr Ilana Mushin, said the competition was a wonderful opportunity for high school students to be introduced to the field of linguistics and to hone their analytic skills.

"Students compete in teams to solve challenging problems in language and computational analysis," Dr Mushin said.

"The winning team has the opportunity to represent Australia at the International Linguistics Olympiad (ILO), to be held in Uppsala, Sweden in July.

"This is the second year OzCLO has been held in Queensland; in 2009 members of the winning Queensland team represented Australia at the ILO in Poland."

The competition opens students to the richness and diversity of language while also allowing them to exercise logic and reasoning skills. No knowledge of linguistics or a particular language is required to take part in the games.

More information can be found at www.ozclo.org.au

Media: Dr Ilana Mushin (07 3365 6810, i.mushin@uq.edu.au) or the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies (07 3365 6311)