Bulletins from the club.
A Parent's Guide to the Linguistics Olympiad: Time Cost, Realistic Expectations and How to Help
What the IOL actually asks of a student, an honest weekly time budget by stage, what it does and does not do for applications, and how to support without taking over.
How to Start a Linguistics Olympiad Club at Your International School: A Term-One Playbook
A practical term-one playbook for launching a linguistics olympiad club: the session format that works, a twelve-week arc, where problems come from, and how to keep a mixed group.
The First 15 Minutes of an IOL Problem: A Triage Method That Works on Any Language
A repeatable four-step routine for the opening minutes of any linguistics olympiad problem: inventory, alignment grid, one falsifiable rule, then commit or park.
NACLO or the China Route? Which National Linguistics Olympiad Path You Are Actually Eligible For (2026-2027)
There is no direct entry to the IOL. You qualify through a national olympiad first — and which one you may enter is decided by citizenship and where you are enrolled, not by how good you are at puzzles. Here is the eligibility fork, the two-round NACLO structure with its real numbers, and what each group should do instead of guessing.
Poetry, Metre and Rhyme Problems at the Linguistics Olympiad: How to Scan a Language You've Never Seen
Verse problems ask you to reconstruct the rules of poetry in an unknown language. Learn to scan metre, rhyme and parallelism with a repeatable method and worked examples.
The Linguistics Olympiad Concepts Toolkit: 12 Grammar Ideas That Unlock Hard Problems
Stop solving IOL problems at random. These 12 recurring grammar ideas — from vowel harmony to ergative alignment — unlock a huge share of hard problems once you can name them.
Sign-Language Problems at the Linguistics Olympiad: How to Decode a Puzzle Type Most Students Never Practise
Sign-language problems scare students because they look nothing like translation puzzles. Learn the five sign parameters and a repeatable decoding method, with worked examples.
Does Speaking Chinese Help at the IOL? Bilingual Advantages and Blind Spots (2026)
The IOL requires no language knowledge – yet growing up with Mandarin and English quietly shapes how you solve. The real advantages, the real blind spots, and how to train both.