UKLO: UK Linguistics Olympiad

[roisin]

Has anyone come across this? I'd never heard of it, bit ds2 has done exceptionally well in it. But he's not a linguist and has little interest in learning languages. (He's doing French GCSE, but is not continuing with it in 6F.)

Well done your DS! Linguistics is actually very different from languages: in fact, looking around, you don't need any qualifications in languages to do a degree in linguistics. It's about how languages work in general. I think you would expect someone who was going to enjoy linguistics to be interested in grammar of languages, but grammar gets so little attention at GCSE that they might not even know. Does your DS like maths? That might go. Worth encouraging him to Google around and see if it's something he might want to pursue.

I work with UKLO! Fab to see a thread about it on MN :-) And well done to your son for his (I assume) Round One success! Linguistics is a wonderful and broad subject, with many areas of specialism and the potential for plenty of career paths, and as ScottishProf says, need not necessarily entail foreign language study (although as you can imagine, plenty of linguists also have foreign language backgrounds or interests). Perhaps your DS might be interested in A Level English Language? It is very linguistics based.

PS UKLO have a website www.uklo.org and you can also find us on Facebook and Twitter!

Yes, he did the advanced first round challenge and got a gold certificate, despite being only 15. He's been invited to apply to attend a camp at Cambridge at the end of summer. He's a maths geek and interested in coding and computer programming; so it's the logic puzzles that he enjoys.

That's a great set of things to be interested in career-wise, especially now. Hope he enjoys the camp. Wonder if he might like this as a degree option?

www.inf.ed.ac.uk/undergraduate/ail.html

oops, sorry, that page is out of date and the terminology has changed. Try this one - but really all I'm trying to say is that there are lots of opportunities, which presumably the summer school will say more competently!

www.drps.ed.ac.uk/14-15/dpt/utcogscbs.htm