Today the figure is closer to 1.2 million.īut his email wasn’t ignored. By comparison, at its height in the 18th century, there were an estimated four million Irish speakers. When he was 17, Higgs “had this kind of crazy teenage idea.” He had begun using Duolingo, a mobile language-learning app, to study French, and wondered if the creators had considered adding support for Irish.Īt the time in early 2013, there were five languages on Duolingo, the smallest of which, Italian, has an estimated 67.9 million speakers worldwide. Higgs, 23, though, is one of a small cohort of educators and activists reinventing how minority languages are taught and preserved online by using cutting-edge technology. If developers and smartphone manufacturers aren’t willing to invest in supporting minority languages, that would cut off people who speak them from an important way to communicate and trap those languages in the past. It was once widely feared that the internet revolution would speed up this decline. Today, almost 40% of the 7,000 languages spoken worldwide are endangered, according to the United Nations. Most of all he hated the effect the lessons had on his fellow students’ willingness to speak the language.īut the Dublin native never lost his love for Irish, nor his opinion that more people should be learning the language. He hated the way it was taught, overly formal and disconnected from ordinary people’s lives.
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