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Comment by akhosravian | Hacker News Reader

Would love to use duolingo, but they have no interest in supporting iranian languages. I’ve never really seen a clear answer for why. They have about 200 million native speakers worldwide. Persian, Pashto, Kurdish are the largest.

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I don't think Persian is out of the question and has been demanded a lot. They still add new courses every year, even smaller languages like Tagalog. I wouldn't be surprised that Persian is on their roadmap somewhere.

But it's harder because the writing system is tricky. They teach arabic and probably that was already pretty difficult to implement. Persian will also need customizations similar to arabic.

If I had to guess, I would say it's probably something like not enough demand from non-Iranian speakers to learn Iranian languages.

This is the same for me but with Basque. People have been campaigning to get a course published for years now, with volunteers willing to help, but for whatever reason they refuse; which is a shame as from a linguistic point of view it is a very rare and interesting language and culture and would help people in Spain a lot in my opinion.

There was a point where Duolingo was trying to teach languages including endangered ones as their primary goal. But it feels like every year they're moving more towards making money as their main main objective. I'm not optimistic about them expanding their list of languages. Most of their lesser known languages are getting fewer updates than Spanish, French, Japanese. It makes business sense to focus your hours on features and languages people are actually using but it's still frustrating thinking of what Duolingo could have been and used to promote vs what it turned out to be.

It's not just about the money. You can make an argument that they want to serve as many people as possible in the best possible way, and that means concentrating their limited resources on the languages people want to learn most.

Hmm, I guess what they're interested mostly is how many people are interested in learning Iranian languages. Not saying that the number is small, but I'd guess it's maybe too small for them to matter?

I don’t think this argument holds as they added languages with a very low amount of speakers such as Navajo, Hawaiian, Guarani and Māori and even High Valyrian and Klingon. I would hazard a guess that more people would find use in Iranian.

(For the record, I’m not saying the above languages shouldn’t be included, rather that the argument doesn’t hold up)

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