Teams from the United States and Russia took top honors at the Ninth International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) at Carnegie Mellon, which ended July 29. In individualcompetition, students from the U.S., Russia and Estonia each took home gold medals.

The event brought together 102 high school students from 19 countries, including four countriesnew to the competition: Brazil, Canada, United Arab Emirates and Vietnam.

"It is the first timethe Olympiad was held outside Europe, and we are happy that participants from all over the world made their way to the USA," said Lori Levin, the organizing committeechair and an associate research professor in CMU's Language Technologies Institute.

The students werechallenged with problems that required them to reason about Faroeseorthography, Menominee morphology, Vai syntax, Nahuatl semantics, the rules ofSanskrit poetry and the structure of the barcode language EAN-13. Forinformation on the problems, visit the IOL website. Video interviews withparticipants are available on Facebook.

Out of four goldmedals that were awarded at the individual contest, one went to Morris Alper fromthe USA who got the highest score, and the other three went to Eva-Lotta Käsper from Estonia and Daria Vasilyeva and Alexey Kozlov from Russia. Participantsfrom Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Korea, Latvia, Poland, Slovenia and UK canboast silver and bronze medals.

In the team contest,the gold medal was awarded to one of the U.S. teams, known as "U.S. Red," whichalso had the highest average score in the individual contest. The silver andbronze medals both went to Russia: the Saint-Petersburg and Moscow teams,respectively.

The next Olympiad willbe held in Slovenia in 2012.