Why Duolingo doesn't have Somali (and what to use instead)

Duolingo is the first app most people open when they decide to learn a language, and for Somali it is a dead end: there is no course. This post explains the likely reasons, what has and has not changed over the years, and what a family can use today instead of waiting.

The short answer

Duolingo teaches more than 40 languages. Its list includes three that Somali families often notice: Swahili, Zulu and Arabic. Somali is not there, and it has never been on the public course list. Duolingo’s children’s products, Duolingo ABC and the Kids app, are English-only, so they do not help either.

We keep a plain answer to the search question at does Duolingo teach Somali, and a feature-by-feature look at Luuqad vs Duolingo. This post is about the why.

What building a course actually involves

A language course on Duolingo is not a word list. It is thousands of sentences, each one written, checked and translated; audio for every sentence, recorded by native speakers or produced with voices that native speakers have checked; a team of native-speaking editors to catch errors; and a curriculum that decides what a learner meets in week one and what waits until month six. Then it has to be maintained, because learners report mistakes every day.

That work is expensive, and it does not get cheaper in proportion for a language with fewer paying learners. For Somali, the pool of content editors trained to write in the standard orthography is small, and the audio needs native speakers to record or check every line. None of this makes Somali impossible. It makes it a project that someone inside the company has to choose to fund.

How languages get chosen

Duolingo does not publish its selection criteria, so anything specific is a guess. What is visible from the outside is the pattern: the company is a business funded by subscriptions and ads, and the languages it adds tend to be ones with very large learner demand, like Spanish, French and Japanese, or a clear strategic reason. It is fair to say that Somali, spoken across the Horn of Africa and by a large diaspora, does not yet show up as a big enough market in the places Duolingo measures. That is a market prioritization decision, not a judgment on the language.

Two things make the numbers harder for Somali. Most people who want to learn it are heritage speakers in the diaspora, spread across many countries, so they are not counted as one market. And many of the people asking are parents looking for something for their children, whom Duolingo’s main app is not designed for.

The Incubator years, and why they ended

For several years Duolingo ran the Incubator, a program that let volunteer native speakers build courses for free. That is how a number of smaller languages reached the app, and it is why people still ask why a Somali volunteer team never got a course through.

Duolingo wound down volunteer contributions in 2021 and now builds courses with in-house teams and paid contractors. Whatever the chances were before, volunteer-built courses are no longer how Duolingo adds languages. A Somali course would have to be commissioned by the company, on the same terms as any other language, and would compete for the same budget.

Will it ever change?

Nobody outside the company knows. Duolingo does not publish a roadmap of upcoming languages, and it has not announced Somali. There are petitions asking for a course, and requests come up regularly on social media and in the app’s own feedback channels. Those are worth adding your voice to, because visible demand is the one thing an outside community can supply. But there is no timeline, and a family should not plan around one.

The honest framing is this: a Somali course on Duolingo would be welcome, and it is out of your hands. What is in your hands is the next ten minutes of Somali with your child.

What to use instead

Four apps teach Somali today, and they suit different people.

For a child, we recommend Luuqad, because we built it for exactly the family Duolingo does not serve: pictures of Somali life, every word recorded by a native speaker, and games a six-year-old will ask for. For an adult who wants to drill phrases quickly, uTalk or Ling will do that job well. The alternatives page keeps this list current as apps add or drop Somali.

Learning Somali without waiting

Whatever app you choose, the things that make Somali stick are the same. Start with the alphabet, because Somali spelling tells you the pronunciation of every word once you know the sounds of C, X, Q and DH. Learn words in topics, ten at a time, and use them the same day: Biyo i sii (give me water) at the table is worth more than a word learned and shelved. Give a child phrases for a real person, such as Subax wanaagsan, ayeeyo (good morning, grandmother), so the language has a job to do. And keep it daily and short, because ten minutes every evening beats an hour on Sunday. Put the first verbs to work as commands, the way a parent speaks to a child: Cun (eat) at dinner and Seexo (sleep) at bedtime need no grammar at all.

The free dictionary on this site is organized by the same topics as the app, with native audio for every entry, so you can start tonight without installing anything.

Written by Luuqad team. The people who make Luuqad. Illustrations from the Luuqad app.