WugLing is launched with the mission to make language studies more accessible to the public. Most linguistic competitions, such as the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL), have high academic barriers to entry due to their grammatical and logic-based problems, making it difficult for beginners to prepare for.
With this aim, our team of IOL-experienced linguistic enthusiasts designed an open, inclusive, and interactive competition that resembles realistic linguistic fieldwork by bridging the public and the academic. Through open-ended questions that invite participants to learn on the spot and offer subjective responses, WugLing wishes to demonstrate that the subject of linguistics does not need to be confined within academia and can be immersive and engaging, appealing to the wider community to explore the vast world of everyday language around us.
In addition, in order to prepare participants for the contest and to stress the importance of the link between language heritage and cultural preservation, we hosted 'The Untranslatable,' an 8-week linguistics mentor program (June-August 2025) that taught basic morphosyntax, lexical gaps, and ethics of translation. Together, we researched the process of interpreting and translating endangered and less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) as well as their moral and ethical implications.
WugLing 2025 was held from August 15 through September 1.
The theme for WugLing 2025 was “Games,” celebrating nuances of folk dialects and storytelling of diverse cultures.
Questions included Northern Chinese folk games, Māori board games, Filipino street game Patintero, Kayardild cases, and Mandarin “baby talk” / child language.
The theme for WugLing 2024 was “Archipelagos,” employing cross-disciplinary insights from island communities.
Questions included Hawaiian Pidgin, Samoan, Balinese, and Jamaican Patois.
Poetry by Athalia
It is the enterprise that makes progress
What's left is people
Ever since, on the grass
There is a new shadow
outside of doctrine
escape
Explanation: The inspiration for this poem primarily came from several instructive and promotional texts. They are well integrated with society, but they are not necessarily compatible with nature, because their existence is a challenge to our inherent concept of "nature." And the "natural" writing that truly "integrates" into that inherent concept should be "things" deprived of textual attributes, that is, "writing without expression," words that are objects like branches and fallen leaves.