All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO)

Volunteering | If you are excited by the idea of joining an amazing team of volunteers in Bucharest and creating an incredible event for young students fascinated by linguistics, consider volunteering at IOL 2026!

We've sent details of our zoom workshop for students (tomorrow eve Thurs 8th Jan) to registered schools. Email us if you need details. We will be using Friulian, Malay and Say it in Abma puzzles from the puzzle bank to discuss how to solve Preliminary Round puzzles. Reminder that registration for schools closes on Friday 23rd January.

Thinking of signing up for season 2 of Traitors Ireland? Better brush up on your Ogham!

Happy to announce that AILO 2025/26 is open for secondary school registration. Sign up for materials, island-wide workshops and to be challenged with something outside the box! Open to all secondary school students on the island. More information at ailo.adaptcentre.ie/enter AILO also selects the international team who will represent Ireland in Bucharest, Romania next July.

Congratulations to our Irish team Michael Costello (St Kilian’s Deutsche Schule), Aidan Alexander (St Mac Dara’s Community College), Patrick Chen (St Gerard’s School Bray) and Kevin Lin (Adamstown Community College). All four students did us proud at the International Linguistics Olympiad in Taipei with Aidan taking home an honourable mention in the individual competition.
https://ailo.adaptcentre.ie/ireland-wins-honourable-mention-at-iol-2025-in-taiwan/

Secondary Schools can sign up for the SFI ADAPT All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO) at https://ailo.adaptcentre.ie/enter Thanks to funding from the The Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, an AILO programme brochure and training materials have arrived in every secondary school on the island. There will be a free workshop series from Sept until Dec. This year, as well improving your problem-solving and language awareness skills, you can compete to represent Ireland in Brazil at the International Olympiad next July.

Well done to the Irish team representing us this week at the International Linguistics Olympiad in Bansko, Bulgaria: Naoise Sheridan from Tullamore College, Offaly, Finn Wallace from CBC Monkstown,, Paddy Clancy from St Vincent’s Castleknock and Megan Boland (from Ursuline Secondary School, Thurles, Tipperary. Paddy Clancy won an honourable mention in the Individual Round. They are such a wonderful group and a fantastic team. Well done all! https://ailo.adaptcentre.ie/ireland-wins-honourable-mention-at-international-linguistics-olympiad-in-bulgaria/

Atlas Fellowship The Atlas Fellowship is a $10,000 scholarship and free 11-day program for curious students who want to understand and change the world.

Dear friends of AILO,
We join the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) community in mourning the loss of Dragomir Radev, a founder and a key figure in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) and a team leader of the USA team at IOL. Drago was also a talented researcher who made significant contributions to the fields of Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics.
As a professor of computer science and engineering, Dragomir's work focused on developing algorithms and models to process human language. He was a pioneer in the field of computational linguistics, and his research had a profound impact on the development of machine learning techniques for natural language processing. Drago had huge enthusiasm for linguistic problem-solving and was dedicated to educating and inspiring the next generation of computational linguists.

All of us in the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO) at the ADAPT Centre will sorely miss seeing Drago at the IOL every year and we will never forget him. Our thoughts are with his family, friends and all the NACLO team at this time.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis.