Students of an endangered language may be less motivated than students of a language that is deeply relevant to their lives. Languages die because people don’t need them anymore, and that’s a fact that Duolingo can’t change. It’s easy for anyone with regular internet access to start using Duolingo - it’s a free app, after all - but user retention is an additional concern.

Even though 3 million people have begun learning Irish on the app, for instance, that’s also the course in which users make the slowest progress. Sadly, Duolingo’s statistics may paint a falsely rosy picture about the revival of these languages. Duolingo’s course launched in 2015, and now 645,000 people are using the app to learn the language. The number of Welsh speakers worldwide is diminishing, and only 19 percent of the Welsh population reported being able to speak the language in 2011. There’s also Welsh, which Duolingo added per the request of the Prime Minister of Wales, who “wrote to us about the importance of preserving and spreading the language,” Kron tells Inverse. Paraguay's capital, Asunción most people who live by the Paraguay River around the city speak Guaraní. So Duolingo launched an Irish course in 2014, and it’s been massively successful, particularly in the United States Kron suspects that “many people are learning the language to better connect with their Irish heritage.”īut it’s not just Irish - it’s many other rare languages, too. “He and many others felt it was important to preserve the language and introduce it to even more people worldwide.” “A couple of years ago, a teenager from Ireland made a strong case to us for launching the Irish language,” Michaela Kron, the company’s PR manager, tells Inverse. In November 2016, he publicly thanked Duolingo for helping to save the Irish language (also known as Gaelic or Irish Gaelic): While there are only 100,000 native speakers of Irish, an incredible 3 million people are using Duolingo to learn the language. The president of Ireland certainly thinks so.

Globalization hasn’t been kind to local cultures or their mediums of expression, but endangered languages may find a surprising digital hero in the app Duolingo.

Duolingo foreign language