Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Soon it's time: IOL 2015!! #ioling - greetings to all from board member in Australia

It's now 5 days left until this years International Olympiad in Linguistics! Students, team leaders, organisers and jury members are soon starting their journeys to Blagoevgrad in Bulgaria, in fact many have already started! People are flying in from all the way from Australia, Japan, Estonia, Isle of Man and many more places. There will be 44 teams from 29 countries, competing in 18 languages on fantastic linguistic problems concocted by our wonderful problem committee and to be graded by the fantastic jury. (If you want to know more about the languages of the IOL, click here.)

If I may, I'd just like to introduce myself and address all people currently on their way or already at this year's event. My name is Hedvig Skirgård, I'm a member of the IOL board and I work with our public outreach together with Simona Klemenčič. (I am also part of the organisation of the Swedish contest, but nowadays I live in Australia where I'm doing my PhD in linguistics.) This will be the first time in 7 years that I cannot attend, and I just want to wish all participants the very best via this our blog since I cannot be there. Good luck everyone! I hope you do well in the contest, but also in making friends. The IOL is a great opportunity to connect with other likeminded young people from all over the world, I hope you all will have a great time and meet many fun new friends!

Linguistics is a great discipline, and it's getting more and more exciting every year. There's lots happening and we're very glad to get to know young enthusiastic people and engage with you. Don't be scare to ask us organisers and team leaders questions about linguistics and academic life. You can also, if you want pose questions here on this blog I run about linguistic diversity and description.

There are many people working to bring this all together: Aleksandar Velinov and his team of local organiser, the IOL board, the problem committee, the organisers of the contests in each country, team leaders, sponsors and more. I want to wish all of them the very best, and hope that this will be fun for them as well. If you are a participant reading this, be sure to be terribly nice to all of these people, as usual :)!

Also: don't forget to use the hashtag #IOLING when sharing photos and posts on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc)!

All the best wishes to everyone from Hedvig in Canberra - 15,364 km away

Want to find our more about the IOL? Visit these sites!

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And don't forget: Един език никога не е достатъчен!

Късмет!
Довиждане!