![]() Lessons on Duolingo are a collage of colorful progress bars, ticks and crosses, cartoon characters cheering you on, doling out small hits of dopamine as you click your way to linguistic mastery. For minority languages, however, language education is often not just a matter of mastering a vocabulary and a grammar, but of immersing oneself in a culture, a history, a way of life. ![]() The company, which was recently valued at $700m, views the inclusion of languages with fewer speakers as part of a broader mission to become the most complete language education platform online.įor dominant languages like English and Spanish, which are highly standardized and deeply entrenched in global culture, Duolingo’s simple, game-ified approach to pedagogy – Learn Spanish in Five Minutes a Day! – makes sense. “And we realized that we were going to make a lot of people angry, no matter what we picked.”Īlong with Hawaiian, Scottish Gaelic and Navajo, Yiddish is one of several minority languages in development phase on the Duolingo platform. “People felt like this was not just a question about a dialect, but a political, socio-cultural question,” Viswanath said. Teaching a dialect, therefore, is seen by many as a defiant homage to what was lost. There were 13 million Yiddish speakers before the Holocaust today the number hovers at around half a million. This was further heightened by a fraught history. Others argued that Central Yiddish, which is most widely spoken, made more sense. ![]() It triggered a community-wide debate: some felt that the Northern dialect, which closely matches the written form, was most appropriate. Uncertain how to navigate this impasse, the team drafted a poll and posted it online, inviting others to vote. So whose dialect was going to be digitally archived as the Yiddish dialect? Whereas a speaker of Northern European Yiddish is more likely to have been taught at a secular university or school. ![]() If you hear someone speaking Central European Yiddish, Viswanath explained to me, it would be a relatively safe bet that they are from a Hassidic community in Brooklyn. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |