linguistics

The diversity of languages led to the genre of linguistic problems. In a typical linguistic problem, a solver is faced with a foreign language, possibly one that they have not even heard of before. There is no expectation that the solver has any prior knowledge about the language. Instead, they are challenged to understand some phenomena from the foreign language given data that appear in the problem.

There is only so much that can be conveyed by general descriptions; here are two sample problems.

If linguistic problems sound intriguing to you, take a look if there is a national linguistic olympiad in your country. As in other science olympiads, the participants of linguistic olympiads are high school students. There are hundreds of enjoyable problems of various difficulties spread across the national olympiads, as well as the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL). Especially at the IOL, the featured languages are often indigenous, sometimes endangered. For example, three out of the five individual problems at the 19th IOL were about languages with fewer than 20 living native speakers.

My participation during high school times led to two silver medals and a gold medal at the IOL (2015-2017). Right after, I joined the organising team of the Czech Linguistics Olympiad (ČLO), and had the honour of being a Czech team leader at the IOL in 2018 and 2019. In 2021, I was invited to join the Problem Committee of the IOL, consisting of over 30 people from around the world. Since then, I came as a part of the on-site Jury to every IOL (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025).

I have been involved in problem creating, testing, selecting, editing and marking, as well as some organisational matters. I am also responsible for the Czech version of the problems set at the IOL since 2022. Occasionally, contribution to linguistics olympiads takes a less scientific shape: at the 4-day-long camp of ČLO in 2025, I found myself in the role of a cook for about twenty people.

Below is an alphabetically ordered selection of my favourite authored problems – perhaps you will enjoy giving them a go: