Final of the first "Déchiffreurs de Langues" linguistics competition for high school students
The aim of the "Déchiffreurs de Langues" competition? To enable all participants to practice decentering and broaden their linguistic and cultural horizons. Based on deduction, reflection and a touch of intuition, this competition follows in the footsteps of the Linguistics Olympiads but revisits them: the progressive difficulty of the questions, the division of the riddles into different stages, the presence of clues that students can choose whether or not to use (using them loses points): without cutting back on knowledge, these arrangements make it a fun competition with a pedagogical aim where every student can find a place and be, at his or her level, successful.
This year, participants tackled in teams the mwotlap (language of Vanuatu), the ginyanga (language of Togo), the ditema tsa dinoko script (invented in South Africa), or some of the mysteries of Germanic languages.... The eleven finalists also set foot in the Japanese calendar and the hiragana script, not forgetting the Hawaiian numeral system. The teaching aids used for the competition will subsequently be distributed online, accompanied by explanations and video capsules: the aim is to make teaching resources available to teachers and the general public, in order to provide a different way of discovering languages and a discipline - linguistics - that is often misunderstood.
This first edition was won by four students from the Lycée Galilée in Gennevilliers: Corinne Ye, Viviane Zheng, Loïc Zhu and Clément Zheng showed remarkable linguistic sense in their answers to the various riddles. They went home with a collection from the Inalco plurilingual writing competition and, like all the other finalists, with a book from the Asiathèque's "80 mots du monde" collection. Readings that will be an opportunity to continue their journey between languages and cultures.
As part of the Cordée "Langues et Cultures du Monde", an educational cultural action program organized by Inalco for secondary school students, this competition was imagined and organized by three "language freaks", Ekaterina Aplonova (doctoral student, Inalco/LLACAN, specialist in Ginyanga), Alex François (teacher-researcher, specialist in the languages of Vanuatu, attached to LATICE), and Florian Targa (Inalco graduate in literary translation/Arabic, coordinator of the Cordée "Langues et Cultures du Monde").
The "Déchiffreurs de Langues" will be blowing out their second candle next year, and the success of the proposed format (this first year having served as a "pilot" competition) will lead to organizing the competition on a larger scale, with the aim of making it an annual event. And why not one day send the winners to take part in the famous International Linguistic Olympiads?
People interested in contributing to this educational and linguistic adventure are invited to get in touch: florian.targa@inalco.fr
