Western Washington University

01/28/2026 | News release | Distributed by Public on 01/28/2026 16:03

High schoolers coming to WWU tomorrow for the Linguistics Olympiad

High schoolers coming to WWU tomorrow for the Linguistics Olympiad

January 28, 2026

High school students from 15 Western Washington high schools will participate in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) this Thursday, Jan. 29, at Western Washington University.

High school students compete in the Linguistic Olympiad by solving challenging problems using data from a variety of languages and formal systems. The competition is an excellent way of helping high school students discover their talents and interests in the areas of language, linguistics, and natural language processing, no prerequisite knowledge required.

Thousands of high school students across the US and Canada will participate at the same time (9 a.m. to noon, PST) in this annual Olympiad, which has been going on since 2006. Western's Department of Linguistics has hosted the annual competition since 2013.

The top scorers of the competition are eligible to represent their countries at the International Olympiad in Linguistics (IOL). This year's IOL will be held in Bucharest, Romania.

Linguistics Professor and Chair Kristin Denham coordinates the event. For more information, see the Linguistics website or reach out to [email protected].

Western Washington University published this content on January 28, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on January 28, 2026 at 22:03 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]