Many congratulations go to Fifth Former Oscar Hudson, who achieved a gold award in the recent UK Linguistics Olympiad (UKLO). Oscar was competing against 1650 pupils from around the country and in order to achieve gold, Oscar’s test score needed to be within the top 5% of the country.

The UKLO is a national competition for school aged children which involves solving linguistic data problems. During the Olympiad, competitors answered questions about not only English but about a range of languages, many of which they had never even heard of. Oscar was required to decipher sentences in Icelandic, Vietnamese, Albanian and a tiny language called Central Pame, spoken by only 5000 people in Central Mexico. The test demanded high linguistic aptitude and the ability to recognise patterns in languages. Last year Oscar achieved silver and so was naturally delighted to go one better this year.  

Michael Dawson, Teacher of Modern Languages said, “Oscar is an excellent linguist and is really dedicated to learning as much as he can. I am extremely proud of him!”

Oscar is currently studying French and German at GCSE level, and hopes to eventually go on to study linguistics at university.

We wish him all the very best with his studies.

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