Writing a book about Russo-Ukrainian war.
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ABOUT ME: Born in the USSR; lived in 4 countries; have a degree in philosophy; media analyst; sailing skipper; yoga instructor; own an online business since 1999 (Elenasmodels•com)
According to the language learning app Duolingo, English remained the most popular choice among learners in 2023.
The top-10 most studied languages worldwide:
- English
- Spanish
- French
- German
- Japanese
- Korean
- Italian
- Hindi
- Chinese
- Portuguese
The map above shows the most studied language by country.
Duolingo provides learning apps to study over 40 languages, ranging from English, French, and Spanish to less commonly studied languages such as Welsh, Irish, and Swahili.
- All in all, in 2023 English remained No. 1 most studied language in 122 countries on the app.
- In 2023, Korean jumped past Italian for the No. 6 spot in the rankings. A large part of the increase is attributed to the fandom surrounding Korean music and movies. South America has seen a surge in learners taking on Korean, as has India.
- Russian, which previously held the No. 10 spot, was ousted from the top-10 by Portuguese in 2023.
After Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the popularity of the Russian language in the world dropped, with courses of Russian closing in many European countries. The popularity of learning the Ukrainian language, vice versus, increased.
Almost 40% of those learning Ukranian list their top motivation as a way to connect with other people, said Duolingo’s content editor Cindy Blanco: “It is a way people may show solidarity during the war.”
Cindi Blanco.
The top countries that had the most users learning Ukrainian were the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Poland. Next on the list was, surprisingly, Russia — and, unexpectedly, Ukraine itself, where many former Russian speakers no longer wish to converse in Russian in their daily lives.
- One of the most prevalent trends among younger users was their interest in learning less common languages: much of the interest in Ukrainian was driven by ‘Gen Z’ users.
- Growing interest in Asian languages has been also strongly influenced by younger learners: 86% of the people learning Japanese and 76% of those learning Chinese were under 30.
In 2024, the company expects that Asian languages will continue growing in popularity.
After the onset of the Israeli-Hamas war, interest in Arabic and Hebrew is likely to change as well. It will be interesting to see whether this will affect the top-10 ranking in 2024.
