This year’s LingoSlam was certainly a special event filled with laughter, thought-provoking facts about language, and yummy cake. The 10-year anniversary was celebrated by having one participant from each semester, so all semesters were represented in the competition.
If you were not there with your own set of eyes to experience this awe-inspiring event – fear not!
Here is a recap of the legendary LingoSlam of 2026
The event took place on the 17th of April at 14:15. After students, professors, and other language-lovers had gathered around and gotten a cup of coffee and a slice of cake it was finally time for the first participant to enter the stage: Jeanne from 10th semester (4th semester of the Master’s Degree). Jeanne was dressed to impress, painted in a multitude of lemony tones to match the vibez of her presentation: The Linguistic Influence of Lemonade Mouth. Through a playful run-through of the movie Lemonade Mouth, Jeanne took us through the upbeat, yet serious subjects of the soundtrack of the movie all while criticizing evil jocks and capitalism.
Next up was Clara from 2nd semester of the Bachelor’s Degree talking about the writing system of her SOLIA language, Abugida. It was indeed an interesting and new look into how a language may be invented, as she presented how she goes about the process in a not so known way – writing system before phonological inventory, vocabulary and grammatical rules. It was especially intriguing how she went about inventing new signs for letters from the Latin alphabet and how her system has evolved over time with the pursuit of it being as simple as possible. It was indeed beautifully illustrated letters.
Then it was time for Katrine from 6th semester, the final participant before the break. Katrine went into depth about Pokémon names and word formation strategies. She covered blending, compounding, borrowing, reduplication, meaning extension, spelling extension, clipping, hypocorism, contraction, backformation, backwardformation, and anagramformation (basically everything) WITH examples, all while the audience were falling off their chairs from laughter. It was indeed informative, but her delivery of the absurd names and sense of humor snuck into the powerpoint; it was like watching a nerdy version of stand-up comedy.
After the break, Silas from 4th semester stepped up. He told the story of the lecturers (and TAs) of the Linguistics department (and Nim Chimpsky) fighting to the death in the Hunger Games arena. A lot happened. The story featured brutal deaths, betrayals, and a happy ending for Anders Højen only. Furthermore, it was very entertaining to watch the judges exclaim in pain or victory when their avatar in the made-up Hunger Games died or killed someone.
The final participant was Jonathan from 8th semester (2nd semester of the Master’s Degree). He went through the entire history of the Danish word for carbonated water, “danskvand”. It all started with bicarbonate of soda, also known as baking soda, roots from ancient Egypt and even some belittling of Sweden. We sat back at a loss of words, as the historical walk through of the word “danskvand” truly was a flabbergasting experience. It makes you think, and it makes you want to drink.
It was then time to vote for the winners, and after 5 tense minutes of voting, the winners were declared. The winners of LingoSlam 2026 are pictured holding their diplomas. In the order of appearance from left to right, they are: Clara (winner of the Creative category), Silas (winner of the Humoristic category), Katrine (winner of the HUMDINGER – best of all), Jonathan (winner of the Academic category), and Jeanne (winner of the Poetic category).
For those of you who took part in the festivities, thank you so much for coming! We hope to see you all, and some new faces, next year! :)
Laura and Jeanne are both part of the student organization ViGør at Aarhus University. ViGør is an academic and social student organization that hosts lectures, student talks and other social events. The events take place every friday from 2:15pm – 4:00pm. There is always cake and coffee, meaning the atmosphere is always informal and cosy.
