Duolingo incubator11/10/2023 “People never actually use in their everyday speech,” says Habash. But because of diglossia, it functions only as the written form of the language, making it sound as erudite as Shakespeare when spoken. In theory, Modern Standard Arabic is understood as a lingua franca by all Arabic speakers, since when written, it is always the same. I think of this not as a fragmentation, but rather a richness, that makes Arabic a very colourful language, and very alive “Arab people often find themselves code-switching between Standard Arabic and their own native dialect depending on the situation,” says Nizar Habash, a professor of computational linguists at NYU Abu Dhabiwho also specialises in using artificial intelligence to analyse the evolution of spoken Arabic dialects for the university. Varying widely across the Arab world these dialects can be so different they’re as distinct as Spanish is to Portuguese. The native language, on the other hand, which people most commonly use to express themselves in everyday situations, is a local or regional dialect of Arabic. The written form, known as Modern Standard Arabic, is usually learnt in school from age six, and is used for reading, writing and formal situations. It’s a tricky language, and there are many forms to learn An Arabic speaker has to speak two distinct, yet parallel languages that co-exist side by side with different domains of use. Even after mastering its scriptand learning to read from right to left, students have been eternally confounded by the realisation that Arabic is, in fact, not actually a single language. It exhibits a unique quality known as “diglossia” – meaning that it’s actually two languages in one. So why has it taken so long for Duolingo’s Arabic course to finally catch up with demand? Anyone who has ever tried to learn Arabic knows it’s an incredibly rich and complex language. The Arab American Institute estimates more than 3.7 million Americans can trace their ancestry back to an Arab country. Interest in learning Arabic is now higher than everĪccording to a study by the Pew Research Centre, Arabic is now the fastest-growing language in the United States. Interest in the new Arabic course has been high, though – more than 300,000 users have registered in the first two weeks, the spokesperson says. But even after the final phase of beta development got fully up and running in January, it stalled again, and the projected release date had to be pushed back to March, which it then again delayed to July. At the time the company had called for contributors to its Arabic course when it launched the incubator programme.ĭuolingo’s Incubator model relies on unpaid volunteers to contribute and translate the content taught using its app, which is free to use. An Arabic course for English speakers had been delayed dozens of times since Duolingo first hinted it was coming soon, back in 2014. Requests for an Arabic course peaked during the European migration crisis of 2015, when courses were launched for Arabic asylum-seekers learning German, French and Swedish, a Duolingo spokesperson says. “There were various starts and stops – Arabic is a very difficult language to learn, as well as teach, and we wanted to get it right,” Michaela Kron, a spokesperson for Duolingo, tells The National. Duolingo first hinted at an Arabic course in 2014 – so why the delay? But many users have long wondered why Duolingo taught fictional languages such as Star Trek’s Klingon and Game of Thrones’s High Valyrian, but not the planet’s fifth-most popular language – Arabic. With more than 300 million users, Duolingo is the largest online language platform in the world, with more people learning a second language through its smartphone apps than in public schools in the United States.
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