Bulletins from the club.
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.
Not Going to Bucharest? How to Follow IOL 2026 from Home and Turn It into Training
IOL 2026 runs 26 July to 2 August in Bucharest. A practical protocol for students at home: what to watch, when problems appear, and how to shadow-solve the new set.