By Mrs Goodall, Head of Classics

NHEHS is famous for offering an amazing array of individual languages, including French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Italian, Latin, and Classical Greek. As well as celebrating the learning of these individual languages, we also have been promoting the study of linguistics with our students. Linguistics is a fascinating and diverse discipline that explores many of the questions you might have about languages: why are some languages so closely connected? How do languages develop over time? How does language reflect social class and gender? At what rate does language change? Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and enables students to consider the languages they are learning in a brand new and exciting way.

Earlier in the term, 18 ambitious Year 11 and Sixth Form students took part in the Advanced Level of the UKLO, solving fiendish problems based on Cantonese Braille, Seri (a language spoken by around 800 people on the coast of Mexico), Iñupiak (a dialect of Inuit language), Lezgian (a language spoken in southwestern Russia and northeastern Azerbaijan), and Khana (a language spoken in Rivers State, Nigeria). Not only did 6 students with a Bronze award (Adeline G, Aditi R, Mary Kate T, Isobel L-B, Aneira B, Abi F) but we are incredibly proud of Eleanor P who achieved a Gold certificate, the first NHEHS student in five years to achieve this; she will take part in Round 2 in February.

All of Year 9 took part in GCHQ’s annual National Language Competition in November. They enjoyed completing a wide range of mini linguistics puzzles, introducing them to a wide variety of languages, challenging them on new concepts and vocabulary. Students loved the interactive and fun puzzles, and there was a great buzz in form times and language lessons in which students were competing against each other to reach the top of the leaderboard both at NHEHS and across the country – there were 2738 teams in total, and 29 of those were from NHEHS!

There was stiff competition between our ambitious teams, with Team Dazzling Goose (Nalini, Mylene, Alice, Thea) eventually emerging as the victors, spending over 25 hours between them on the puzzles throughout the week and accruing 6410 points! Special mentions also go to the runners-up, Team Nimble Monkey (Isabella, Kassie, Suhana, Ana), Team Imaginative Beaver (Marissa, Tess, Diya, Natalie), Team Silly Chicken (Sophia, Thesha, Victoria, Yuxin) and Team Tall Boar (Anar, Alexandra, Arshia, Larsa).

Here is what the winning team had to say about their experience: 

We were always doing the challenge together and it really strengthened our friendship. We were constantly fighting for the top spot against our peers, so the end was a mad rush. Maybe next time we could do the harder challenges because at the end we didn’t have much time left and all the hard challenges were still to be done. Collectively, our favourite challenge was the Dragon Wizard challenge because we all feel like we bonded over it. Overall, we really enjoyed this challenge and are looking forward to doing more events like it in the future. 

On the final day of term, the whole school took part in GCHQ’s Christmas Challenge: 7N, 10G, and a combined Sixth Form team of RG, NG, MHC and CCD were victorious! We will also be bringing more opportunities for students to engage in language and linguistics competitions via the UK Linguistics Olympiad for Years 7-10 at the end of January.