I feel like a lot of Duolingo discourse should acknowledge that the reason that they have basically every national European language on there is not because of a “European bias” but because of refugees. A huge number of refugees in Europe use it to learn the language of whatever country they’re moving to or living in; the site even talks about it in the “fun facts” on their waiting screen. Languages like Swedish and Norwegian aren’t there primarily for Minnesotans getting in touch with their heritage, but for African and Asian refugees in Sweden and Norway, and indeed they make up the majority of people using Duolingo to learn those languages. The site does need to add more non-European languages; it’s gradually doing this, it recently added Zulu, Xhosa and Kreyòl, and its focus on indigenous languages like Navajo and Hawaiian is especially commendable, but there are still some glaring omissions of major world languages from Asia and Africa that need to be addressed — and even “they’re edited by users” doesn’t cut it with how many people worldwide speak those whom they could seek out! But the fact that a free language app is doing its best to provide the language learning services that those actual countries routinely deny desperately-poor refugees is a good thing actually. Reserve your rage for the inclusion of Esperanto, Klingon and High Valyrian over Tagalog and Farsi.

There’s a big campaign locally to get Icelandic on Duolingo because there are no competent resources accessible to immigrants. Something like 15% of the country can’t speak the local language, a number that probably goes up to 20% or more during the tourism season. This is a huge problem in society made worse by the head of the largest low wage union saying she thinks that only the bourgeois would want access to language classes during work hours. Duolingo Icelandic could help solve one of the most pressing issues for one of the richest countries in the world - which, yes, is a completely pathetic state of affairs but guess what, not enough people vote with a mind to immigrant affairs and the political will to solve this problem simply doesn’t exist. Finland and i believe some of the other Nordics at least have fully subsidized immersion programs up to B2-C1, Iceland doesn’t. So if Icelandic shows up on Duolingo next, please consider that there’s been a large influx of especially Ukrainian and Palestinian refugees in the past year and the Icelandic government isn’t exactly going out of their way to help them integrate.

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To Learn Klingon Or Esperanto: What Invented Languages Can Teach Us

yeah and like people were so mad that klingon and elvish were on duolinguo before yiddish was…. but those small, compact, simple conlanguages don’t have dialects. or a real-world history of genocide-driven diasporas. yiddish is the language of people without a country. which population’s vocabulary is the most authentic? new york, israel, warsaw, berlin? getting yiddish on to duolinguo took a lot of very careful, very political, work and thought.

the klingon dictionary is already thoroughly digitized and contains roughly 1,800 words.

like, just say your activism is getting performatively mad at things you don’t understand and go.

Also, languages are added not because Duolingo develops them, but because independent teams of people chose to develop them themselves. The team that developed Klingon could not have developed Yiddish, because they didn’t know Yiddish. They weren’t stealing resources from Yiddish because it was not the same pool of resources — ie people. And, Yiddish had been in development for years, but didn’t actually get created until a new team took over. It wasn’t that Duo was stopping or preventing it.

charlie garcia from alamy stock photo is unfuckable! also, i accidentally put him in front of makima from chainsaw man!