History of the IOL

The first linguistic olympiad for secondary school students was organised in 1965 in Moscow on the initiative of Alfred Zhurinsky (1938-1991), eventually a prominent philologist but then only a fifth-year student of linguistics, and under the guidance of the mathematician Vladimir Uspensky. The Olympiad, farsightedly called Traditional since its very beginning, was regularly held at the Moscow State University from 1965 until 1982. In 1988 the Olympiad was resumed at the Moscow State Institute for History and Archives (now the Russian State University for the Humanities), and since 1989 it has been organised jointly by the two institutions. Since 1996 a mirror of Moscow's Traditional Olympiad in Linguistics has been held in Russia's northern capital by St Petersburg State University.

Linguistic contests have also been held regularly in Bulgaria since 1982, being organised by the Union of Bulgarian Mathematicians and the Ministry of Education. In more recent years analogous events were launched in Oregon (US) and the Netherlands. At the same time teams of award-holders of the Moscow Olympiad in Linguistics competed successfully in Bulgaria and vice versa, which demonstrated the potential for international co-operation in this field. Thus was born the idea of the IOL.

The following table presents a summary of the participation in the first seven instalments of the IOL (2003-2012):

Year Venue Countries Teams Participants
2003 Borovets, Bulgaria 6 9 33
2004 Moscow, Russia 7 12 45
2005 Leiden, Netherlands 9 13 50
2006 Tartu, Estonia 9 13 51
2007 St. Petersburg, Russia 9 15 61
2008 Slanchev Bryag, Bulgaria 11 16 67
2009 Wrocław, Poland 17 23 86
2010 Stockholm, Sweden 18 26 99
2011 Pittsburgh, USA 19 27 102
2012 Ljubljana, Slovenia 26 34 131

Teams from these 32 countries have participated in at least one of the first 10 IOLs: Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, UK, USA, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.