Duolingo Preserves Endangered Languages
In celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Duolingo—the most popular language learning platform and the most widely downloaded education app in the world—launched two endangered language courses: Navajo and Hawaiian.
The two new additions represent a larger effort to preserve endangered languages around the world. In fact, according to the United Nations, 40% of the 7,000 spoken languages worldwide are endangered.
Today only 150,000 people speak Navajo, a culture forced to the brink of extinction through generations of inequity. Additionally, the Hawaiian language includes 1,000 native speakers and 8,000 more who understand it. Since both languages were banned in American schools until recently, exposure will hopefully help to increase its usage.
That’s where Duolingo comes in: by increasing small-bite style lessons to a new language learner, the app and website hopes to preserve endangered cultures. The use of technology to revive ancient languages is not a new technique, but rarely can companies extend out to such a large user database. With a large user database to beta test indigenous languages, Duolingo can not only retain current interest in traditional languages but also offer alternative courses.
The history of Duolingo traces back to a graduate student and a professor studying and working respectively a decade ago at Carnegie Mellon University. Distraught by the high expenses of private English lessons, the duo set out to create a free language-learning app, which quickly accumulated over 300,000 users on the waiting list.
The Duolingo app and website are free and, as of August 2019, the company offers 22 languages and includes 300 million registered users.
Three years ago, the president of Ireland publicly thanked Duolingo after its app increased Irish language exposure to 3 million users, on top of its 10,000 native speakers. In his public thank you speech, President Higgins called the study of the Irish language “a basic right” and “an unfinished project.”
Although Duolingo attracts user attention, a language goes extinct every 14 days, according to National Geographic. Duolingo’s mission is to increase educational access, so they have to balance niche demand for endangered languages and popular demand for more widespread languages, notably Chinese, English, and Spanish.
At play are the intersections of language and business. To preserve endangered languages, Duolingo may sacrifice a portion of their users to try the language and lose user retention; on the other hand, preserving an endangered language might garner the interests of politicians and teachers incapable of doing the same—but now having the means to do so at their fingertips.
Image Courtesy of: Duolingo