Best ever results for Latymer at UK Linguistics Olympiad

17 March 2022

Congratulations to all of our students who competed in this year’s UK Linguistics Olympiad (UKLO) Advanced Level. This year we had the highest number of entrants ever fielded by the School for the competition (13) and they have achieved the best results the School has ever enjoyed.

The UKLO is a fun but challenging competition in which students compete to solve problems based on some of the world’s 7,000 languages. Participants use data from a given language to crack codes and solve puzzles. It requires analytical skills and critical thinking. Linguistic Olympiads started in Moscow in the 1950s but there are now over 40 national competitions taking place every year leading up to the International competition.

Year 11 students Adam, Stella and Rhea entered the competition for the first time as did Year 12 students, Juliette, Alexandra and Bee who all performed brilliantly. Stanley; Esme; Elfreda and Sanna came away from the competition with a Bronze as did Didi who narrowly missed out on Silver by 1.2%.

Amitai (Y12) and Xane (Y13) both won Gold and qualified for Round 2 of the competition which involves a 3.5 hour exam. Candidates who do well at this stage are then selected for the UK team for the International competition, which is a huge achievement.

Last year Xane achieved a high Gold award in UKLO Round 1 and was one of 51 students, out of the 1000+ who competed in the Advanced Level competition, to qualify for Round 2. In that second round he was one of the eight highest performers and qualified for the UK team who competed at the 18th International competition, hosted by Ventspils, Latvia in July 2021. Due to pandemic, 216 contestants of 54 teams representing 34 countries took part, competing remotely in their countries, making it the biggest competition in the history of IOL, in terms of the number of contestants.

“This has been the most incredible set of results and Amitai and Xane have done so incredibly well to get through to the next round,” said Mrs Collier who coordinated Latymer’s entry. “They all engaged really enthusiastically with our training sessions and I hope that many of them will have been inspired to participate next year.”