Ireland Wins Honourable Mention at International Linguistics Olympiad in Bulgaria

(L-R) Megan Boland, Paddy Clancy, Naoise Sheridan and Finn Wallace

The Irish team is made up of the top four students from the 2023 All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO) which is run by ADAPT, the SFI Research Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology, at the School of Computing, Dublin City University.

(L-R) Megan Boland, Paddy Clancy, Finn Wallace and Naoise Sheridan

The team members are Naoise Sheridan (18) from Tullamore College, Offaly, Finn Wallace (18) from CBC Monkstown, Paddy Clancy (17) from St Vincent’s Castleknock  and Megan Boland (18) from Ursuline Secondary School, Thurles, Tipperary. Paddy Clancy won an honourable mention in the Individual Round.

In the IOL, the students come up against 200 of the top linguistic problem-solvers, from 30 countries, to tackle some of the toughest puzzles in logic and linguistics in little-known languages from all over the globe. The students faced a 6-hour individual round paper on Tuesday tackling problems such as Guazacapán Xinka from Guatamala and Coastal Marind spoken by approx. 8,000 people in South Papua province in Indonesia. They also sat a challenging 4-hour team round on Wednesday. Well done to the whole team. They have all done us so proud!