{"id":12700,"date":"2014-06-01T12:23:24","date_gmt":"2014-06-01T17:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=12700"},"modified":"2014-06-01T12:23:24","modified_gmt":"2014-06-01T17:23:24","slug":"spelling-bee-champs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=12700","title":{"rendered":"Spelling bee champs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We have often discussed spelling bees and related phenomena on Language Log, e.g.:<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Permanent link to Spelling bees and character amnesia\" href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=5669\" rel=\"bookmark\">\"Spelling bees and character amnesia\"<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Permanent link to Character amnesia and the emergence of digraphia\" href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=7142\" rel=\"bookmark\">\"Character amnesia and the emergence of digraphia\"<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Permanent link to Of toads, modernization, and simplified characters\" href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=5838\" rel=\"bookmark\">\"Of toads, modernization, and simplified characters\"<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Especially in the first post cited above, we have noticed the amazing domination of students of Indian descent in spelling bees.\u00a0 Even though we had a very lively, lengthy exchange on this subject, with many different hypotheses being put forward, no consensus was reached for why Indian students are so overwhelmingly successful in spelling bees.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Now again this year, Indians excelled, so much so that &#8212; for the first time in 52 years &#8212; there were <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/its-a-tie-two-boys-win-2014-scripps-national-spelling-bee\/\">co-champions at the National Spelling Bee,<\/a> and both of them were of Indian ancestry:\u00a0 Ansun Sujoe (age 13!) of Fort Worth, Texas, and Sriram Hathwar (age 14!) of Painted Post, New York.\u00a0 Not only that, Gokul Venkatachalam of Chesterfield, Missouri, who finished third (there was no second place because of the first-place tie) and Ashwin Veeramani of North Royalton, Ohio, who finished fourth, are also Indian-Americans.\u00a0 All four are boys.<\/p>\n<p>The last eight national champions and thirteen of the last seventeen have been of Indian descent, a string of victories that began in 1999 with Nupur Lala's win.<\/p>\n<p>Given the extremely difficult and competitive nature of the spelling bees, it is impossible that the continuing domination of the spelling bees by Indian students over such an extended period is a fluke or an accident.\u00a0 There must be a rational explanation for their success, some secret to their prowess.\u00a0 Consequently, I would like to reopen the debate on this subject and welcome suggestions for making sense of this astonishing phenomenon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We have often discussed spelling bees and related phenomena on Language Log, e.g.: \"Spelling bees and character amnesia\" \"Character amnesia and the emergence of digraphia\" \"Of toads, modernization, and simplified characters\" Especially in the first post cited above, we have noticed the amazing domination of students of Indian descent in spelling bees.\u00a0 Even though we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[238,217],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contests","category-spelling"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12700"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12719,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12700\/revisions\/12719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}