Twelve-year-old Bruhat Soma from Tampa, Florida won the 2024 Scripps Spelling Bee in a spell-off, after the competition ended in a tiebreaker with 12-year-old Faizan Zaki.
The seventh grader won by spelling the word ‘abseil’ in a 90-minute blitz off in which he nailed 29 words correctly. Soma’s family are immigrants from the Indian state of Telangana which has produced several spelling bee contenders.
Past Indian-American spelling bee champions include Dev Shah (2023), Harini Logan (2022), and Shourav Dasari (2017).
Bruhat who received a trophy and over $50,00 in money and prizes spent six months practicing for the Bee. According to AP News, rehearsing for many months made him confident of winning. “I really wanted to win. That’s why I practiced the spell-off so much.”
“This is what I was aiming for. So I’m just really happy that I won this,” he added.
Before 1999, there were only two spelling bee winners of Indian-American descent. The explosion of Indian American spelling bee champions after that seems to coincide with the surge of Indian immigrants after 2000 when nearly 70% of Indian-born U.S. residents arrived in the U.S., according to the census. In 2019 seven of the eight champions were of Indian ancestry.
The reign of Indian-American spelling bee champions in the last decade reflects the impact and success of the second-largest immigrant group in the U.S.