From Panini’s ancient grammar to the frontiers of AI, language continues to inspire discovery. At IIIT Hyderabad, that legacy lives on through its mentoring of India’s Panini Linguistics Olympiad team, which has returned from Romania with Gold and multiple honours at the International Linguistics Olympiad
The earliest documented technical vocabulary of descriptive linguistics is attributed to ancient grammarian Panini. Ashtadhyayi, his foundational Sanskrit grammar text, written between the 4th and 5th century BCE records 4,000 precise, rule-based aphorisms (sutras) to form perfect words and syntax, from roots and suffixes. The vedic scholar was transforming linguistic units into valid sentences, long before western science discovered that language is deconstructed into phonemes and morphemes.
Fast forward to the present, where IOL, the highest ranked international linguistics competition for pre-university students, is firing the lexical imagination of young minds from 40+ countries.
PLO alchemizing Gold and medal winners
It is a matter of great pride that the Indian contingent has consistently won medals in the Best Solution, Best Team, and Best Student categories at every IOL since 2009. IIIT-H took over mentoring the Panini Linguistics Olympiad in 2015 and has continued to build upon the strong foundation established by the PLO community. This year’s winners were Gold medallist Shrilakshmi Venkatraman, Bronze winners Aarav Anil Rao, Nishanth Shankar Lakshmanan and Advay Misra, with Soham Amit Pednekar receiving an Honourable Mention.
As Generative AI and language technologies reshape the world, IIIT Hyderabad’s Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC) is enabling its trajectory with the Panini Linguistics Olympiad (PLO), India’s official channel for mentoring exceptional talent for international Olympiads.
The annual flagship event of LTRC is tasked with creating future linguistic world champions at junior (Grades 6-8) and senior (Grades 9 -12) school levels. The mentor Institution works with the brightest student talent nationwide, on language data to solve challenging puzzles that test cross-disciplinary logical reasoning, pattern recognition, and computational thinking.
“Past participants who used this opportunity have gone on to do higher studies in AI and NLP. Many of them pursued higher education in MIT and other big-ticket institutes and are now leading experts in this particular area”, points out IIIT-H Prof. Parameswari Krishnamurthy who leads PLO’s Coordination efforts.
LTRC builds globgal champions and India’s future technocrats
Unlike mathematics or physics Olympiads, IOL problems do not require prior linguistics knowledge. The ability to find patterns in unfamiliar languages and pure reasoning is rewarded here. The challenging national-level linguistics competition is organised under the aegis of the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL). While the overarching sentiment is fun and puzzles, the mandate is to foster problem solving, computational thinking and appreciation for linguistic diversity.
IIIT-H’s Language Technologies Research Centre, considered one of South Asia’s largest research centers for natural language processing and speech technology has constantly breached traditional academic silos, assimilating the best from computer scientists, linguists, statisticians and corporates. The core of their work is in low-resource Indian languages, building AI tools and linguistic datasets to bridge communication barriers.
How it all began
India’s journey at the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) began in 2009, when an ad hoc team lead by Zarana Sarda took part in IOL 2009 in Wroclaw, Poland. The team comprising of Aakansha Sarda, Sagar Sarda and Niyati Dave saw sweet success when Aakansha secured India’s first international win. Their participation in the 2009 and 2010 sparked the idea for the national Linguistics Olympiad (PLO) by Zarana Sarda. Between 2013-2015, the Department of Linguistics, University of Mumbai got involved and with the backing of Microsoft Research India, they helped to strengthen, broaden the outreach and institutionalize Olympiad activities.
Guided by Prof. Monojit Choudhury, General Chair of PLO and Professor at MBZUAI, and a committed community of organizers, mentors, problem setters, and volunteers across institutions, PLO has continued to strengthen India’s participation in the IOL.
Building on this momentum, India hosted the 14th International Linguistics Olympiad in Mysuru in 2016, bringing together participants from around the world and showcasing India’s growing commitment to linguistics education and the International Olympiad movement.
IIIT Hyderabad hosts Panini Linguistics Olympiad
Since its debut in 2009, India has participated in seventeen Olympiads, fielding 104 participants across 25 teams. When Prof. Dipti Misra attended the 2014-2015 workshop at Bangalore, it set the stage for the next avatar. It has been a rich haul for the Indian contingent, that has earned 37 medals (six gold, nine silver, and twenty-two bronze), one bronze team trophy, nine Best Solution awards, nineteen Honourable Mentions and one Team Contest Honorable Mention. It has produced nine Repeat Medalists inducted into the IOL Hall of Fame. Today, PLO continues to inspire school students across India, fostering curiosity about language and linguistics while preparing the next generation of Olympians.
Over the years, PLO partners have included Microsoft Research Labs who funded the team for several years and academic collaborators – IIT Delhi and University of Mumbai. They are actively supported by regional centers at IIIT Hyderabad, IITs (Bombay, Delhi, Madras Patna and Indore), IISc Bengaluru, Jadavpur University, Rajagiri SET at Kochi, Krishna Public School, Raipur, DDU Nadiad, Deccan College at Pune and SNLTR Kolkata. PLO 2026 was sponsored by InMobi-Glance, Haldiram and an anonymous benefactor.
Talent identification for a strategically critical field
By promoting Linguistics and NLP as viable research careers, India has the wherewithal to position itself as a growing global research presence for careers in Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Cognitive science, and Language technology; sectors central to India’s digital economy.
The expertise of linguists is highly valued today because understanding human syntax and semantics is a necessary link for training and bridging the communication gap with dominant AI technologies. Since linguistics uses structural data to understand unfamiliar languages, real world AI and linguistics open many opportunities for career advancement.
National significance and research alignment
The PLO design and framework closely reflects the vision of the National Education Policy 2020, with its thrust on multidisciplinary education, scientific temper, language promotion and building research capacity from the school level.
Organizers point out specific areas of compliance. For one, “it specifically operationalises NEP’s emphasis on mother-tongue and multilingual education, by making language itself a scientific object of inquiry”. Secondly, with scientific talent identification at school level, it complements existing programmes in science and mathematics, while in the long term, building a pipeline of talent for India’s ambitions to be a global hub for AI and language technology.
AI and Language Technology: a strategically important nexus
The puzzles and challenges presented at the Linguistic Olympiads are not merely intellectual exercises. Analysing grammatical systems, deciphering writing scripts or identifying phonological patterns are foundational skills of computational linguists, that build ability to formalise linguistic structure, identify underlying generative rules, and reason from data. “PLO alumni consistently report that their competition experience formed a significant part of their early intuition for NLP and AI problems”.
Putting the fun into fundamentals
PLO 2026 Registrations kicked off on 13th November 2025, followed by the Open National Qualifying contest across Indian schools on 15th February 2026. Of 525 entries, 338 appeared for the first round. In April 2026, the top scorers advanced to the Invitational Camp and Round Two.
Thirty-four qualifying entries from the Round Two Advanced PLO test layer, participated in a ten-day immersive residential camp held between May 31st – June 10th on the IIIT-H campus. The camp involved lectures and mentoring sessions by experts from academia and industry., problem-solving sessions, mock Olympiads, mentoring and evaluations. The final team selection during the camp was based on Round two scores.
The top two winning teams (Team 1 – Advay Misra, Fiza Faisal, Shrilakshmi Venkatraman, Soham Pednekar and Team 2 – Aarav Anil Rao, Nishanth Shankar Lakshmanan, Meenakshi Hariharan, Sudarshan Manikantan) attended an intensive boot camp before heading to IOL 2026 at Romania. The Indian delegates were led by IIIT-H faculty-in-charge Prof. Parameswari Krishnamurthy, a IIT Kanpur Physics student and 2025 IOL award winner Faraz Siddiqui.
IOL winners’ share their story
About her IOL experience, Gold medallist Shrilakshmi Venkatraman has this to say. “I loved the semantic problem about colour terms in Yelî Dnyé from the individual problem set. The phenomenon was very unique and interesting to unravel”.
Bronze medal winner Aarav Anil Rao’s approach was to carefully note every pattern observed, to create symbols to organize information, and keep testing different ideas until everything fit together. “Participating in IOL meant the opportunity to represent India, one of the world’s most linguistically diverse countries, at an international level”, notes Bronze winner Advay Misra. Nishanth Shankar Lakshmanan, a bronze medallist reflects that while solving logic puzzles initially drew him to linguistics, the global community and exposure to real, endangered languages gave his journey deeper meaning. “Language loss is tightly coupled to social issues and culture,” Nishanth notes, “and the Olympiad made me conscious of what language means to ordinary communities, not just curious academics.”
From foundational rules of language to cutting-edge computational thinking, the core logic remains unchanged. It is about helping students discover that analysing language is as exciting, challenging, and impactful as mathematics or computer science.
Deepa Shailendra is a freelance writer for interior design publications; an irreverent blogger, consultant editor and author of two coffee table books. A social entrepreneur who believes that we are the harbingers of the transformation and can bring the change to better our world.