Islands MSP calls for Scottish Gaelic to be added to Duolingo language app

The hugely popular educational resource has already boosted Irish language, says Chris Mccall

It claims to be the world’s most popular online learning service for new languages. Duolingo, a free digital app, has more than 200 million users worldwide and is one of the most popular downloadable educational tools. It offers 31 language courses to English speakers, including three “constructed languages” such as Klingon. But Scots Gaelic isn’t available. Now an MSP representing most of the country’s native speakers is calling for that to change.

Alasdair Allan, SNP member for Now Na h-eileanan an Iar, wants the language to be added to the platform following the runaway success of its online Irish language course.

Mr Allan said that in the first two years after the Irish language launched on Duolingo in 2014, 2.3 million people started learning it, averaging 3,000 new learners a day. Mr Allan said: “Online tools like Duolingo make it both easy and fun to learn a new language and I would have warmly welcomed a resource like this when I was learning Gaelic. Adding Scottish Gaelic to Duolingo would boost the profile of the language and bring it to a vast new community of language learners, including the Scottish diaspora across the globe.

“I hope Duolingo agrees to add Scottish Gaelic to its services, opening the eyes its millions of users to this beautiful language that gives us a better understanding of Scotland’s history and culture.”

Duopoly was started in 2009 in Pittsburgh by university professor Luis von Ahn and his graduate student Severin Hacker.

A Duolingo spokeman told The Scotsman: “We’re honored to hear Mr Allan’s request for Duolingo to add Scottish Gaelic. There are many considerations when it comes to adding a new language course, like the market size and demand for learning that language, technical limitations and the availability of qualified and committed volunteers to create the course, along with our own small team’s limited resources and time.

“The reality is we can’t add every language we’d like to, as soon as we’d like to, but as we grow through the release of high-demand languages, it allows us to keep adding smaller languages in the future.”