North Allegheny senior Jason Liu made his mark globally after winning a silver medal at the International Linguistics Olympiad, competing against other linguistic opponents from more than 40 countries.

Liu represented Team USA at the competition held in July in Taipei City, Taiwan. A total of 227 contestants from 42 countries competed, with Liu finishing in the top three. Introduced to him by his middle school gifted education teacher, Liu started to take linguistic competitions more seriously over the past year.

“Linguistics competitions are actually pretty interesting in that they’re not all that much about the actual study of linguistics, they’re more like language puzzles that you solve based on patterns you notice and logical deductions,” said Liu, 17, of McCandless.

Liu qualified for the international competition after placing fifth in March at the North American Computational Linguistics Invitational Competition, reserved for students in the United States and Canada.

The U.S. competition first consisted of an open round, which everyone can take, and then an invitational round, to which only about the top 10% from the open round are invited, Liu said. Both rounds are approximately three to four hours long with eight to 10 problems to solve, usually ranging from fairly doable to extremely difficult, Liu said.

The top eight U.S. students from the invitational round are invited to the two IOL teams representing the USA.

Liu also narrowly missed qualifying for the national team in 2024, still getting into the top 20.

“I think the skills that helped me the most were really just thinking critically and creatively as well as being able to persevere through difficult or confusing problems. It’s a really fun thing that I think a lot of people would enjoy,” Liu said.

The International Linguistics Olympiad is an annual international competition for secondary school students and experts from various fields of linguistics. Participants analyze “the grammar, structure, culture and history of different languages and to demonstrate their linguistic abilities through puzzles and problem-solving challenges,” according to the olympiad’s website at ioling.org.

Out of 22 silver medalists, Liu was the only U.S. competitor to win the silver at the Taipei competition this year, according to the results.

This isn’t the first time a North Allegheny student competed at the International Linguistics Olympiad.

Dr. Tom McCoy, a 2013 graduate, was part of a world champion team at the ILO in 2013. Today, he is a professor at Yale University and contributes puzzles and problems to the linguistics contest.

“This competition requires a combination of creativity and problem solving. Contestants need to be able to notice subtle patterns in linguistic data. Doing so requires leaps of insight about how other languages can be different from English,” McCoy said.

“Some of these differences are about fairly superficial properties such as word order, but others go much deeper — for instance, different languages can use different strategies for conceptualizing the world. Language is a window into culture and into the mind, so competing in this contest involves reasoning about an important part of what it means to be human.”

Taiwan was a great experience, Liu said. Only two days out of the seven-day trip were reserved for the competition. He and other teammates enjoyed two sightseeing tours, visiting the city one day and the ocean the next. They had plenty of free time to explore the city, visiting attractions such as the Taipei 101, a skyscraper once classified as the world’s tallest building.

“It was a great experience competing internationally, as it was incredible to meet a lot of people from around the world who also loved linguistics and enjoyed linguistics olympiads so we could share our experiences,” Liu said.

Bucharest, Romania, will be the site of the 2026 event, according to the IOL website.

For anyone interested in learning more about linguistics, Liu recommends checking out the website of the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition at naclo.org.

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