Photo Gallery: Students Compete In Language Olympics At Lake Catholic

The Spanish, French, German, Latin -- and, for the first time, Chinese Mandarin -- students of Lake Catholic High School competed in their annual Language Olympics Tuesday.

The language clubs formed teams that played in dodgeball, speedball and tug-of-war tournaments. They also demonstrated their linguistic acumen with vocabulary, translation and cultural quizzes.

Additionally, the students cooked dishes from the land of their respective languages' origin, which the teachers ranked.

The Language Olympics began in 1988 and have grown more elaborate each year. The students make their own team T-shirts and study hard to win linguistic bragging rights.

This year the Olympics also included a tribute to Nancy Germaine, who taught Latin and German at Lake Catholic for 26 years and helped found the Language Olympics.

Germaine retired last year and passed away suddenly in August.

Many of the Latin and German students wore shirts with Germaine's photo on it in her honor.