Linguistic Gold for Bedford School Fifth Former

Published by Bedford School on Thursday 15th of March 2018

Fifth Former Oscar Hudson received 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 all participants. 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 a range of languages, many of which they had never before heard of. Oscar was tasked to decipher sentences in Icelandic, Vietnamese, Albanian and a little-known 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 he was naturally delighted to improve on his previous performance. Michael Dawson, Teacher of Modern Languages at Bedford School, 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.