(uTalk currently does provide one language indigenous to the Americas - Greenlandic, and of course several European-origin American languages like Latin American Spanish, Argentinian Spanish (yes, it’s a separate thing), Haitian Creole and Canadian French. Apparently some communities in Australia have been hesitant to share their language with outsiders. Richard also mentioned efforts to add Australian indigenous languages to the app, but I don’t know which ones in particular. One of the big complaints people currently have about Duolingo’s Navajo course is that it doesn’t have audio (which is crazy because Navajo is a tonal language and has a pretty complicated phonology), so uTalk’s audio-first approach could be a great fit here. Well, it sounds like uTalk isn’t far behind. You might already know that Duolingo launched Navajo and Hawaiian courses a few months ago. Based on what I learned from Richard during our call, the next frontier might be the indigenous languages of the Americas. The app has pretty clearly outgrown the “Euro” prefix at this point, covering much of Asia and Africa as well, with remarkably thorough coverage of Bantu and Indian languages in particular.
Once upon a time, uTalk was known as Eurotalk. “television” etc.) for the revived language. In the end, uTalk actually helped play a part in the revival of the Manx language, even working with local Manx officials to invent new vocabulary (e.g. But they insisted, and even put in a order for thousands of CDs for Manx. When a group of people from the Isle of Man first asked for uTalk to develop a Manx course, Richard declined, because Manx was essentially a dead language. During our chat, Richard shared a story about how the Manx language got added to uTalk’s collection. Once in a while, people will even volunteer to add a certain language to uTalk. (On behalf of the uTalk team - please don’t do this, it messes up the search results.) Sometimes users even give the app 1-star reviews in the app store just because it doesn’t yet have their language. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “When will you be doing X language?” is one of the questions Richard gets most often from users.
#UTALK LANGUAGE EXAMPLES FULL#
You can find the full list of uTalk’s languages here.Ĭonsidering the political status of Tibet today, and my recent obsession with Turkic languages, I couldn’t help but wonder - “Well, when will uTalk be doing Uyghur?” (uTalk already does provide Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen, Azerbaijani and Turkish, which is excellent.) (Interestingly, it looks like uTalk already supported Dzongkha, a Tibetic language which is official in Bhutan, before Lhasa Tibetan.) The launch had been scheduled to coincide with Tibetan New Year (Losar), which is usually the same day as Chinese/Vietnamese/Korean New Year and fell on the 5th of February this year. (And since the app lets users learn any language through any of the other languages in its collection, that comes out to over 20,000 possible language combinations!)Īs a matter of fact, uTalk had just launched its 142nd language - Tibetan - a few weeks before I spoke with Richard. Now that I’ve tried it, I feel like this was how I should have been using the app all along - taking advantage of the app’s mind-bogglingly large collection of languages, of which it currently has 142. UTalk’s Nat Dinham and Richard Howeson at the Polyglot Gathering in Bratislava, Slovakia When will uTalk be adding ?Īs part of my preparation for our call, I decided to branch out beyond the languages that I had won full access to, and tested out dozens of the other languages in uTalk’s collection. And at LangFest in Montreal last year, I won the uTalk trivia contest again, winning two more full courses and one “quick fix course”: Then at the Polyglot Gathering in Bratislava last spring, uTalk organized another language trivia competition, in which I came in second place and won a bottle of Slovak wine, which was nice. Unfortunately I was distracted by other languages soon after (if I remember correctly, I entered an “Indian language phase” for a few months in late 2017) and I forgot about the app for a while.
#UTALK LANGUAGE EXAMPLES FREE#
The prize was free access to one language on uTalk for a year, and I chose Egyptian Arabic.
The company organized a language trivia competition during the conference, which I won, of course. I first learned about uTalk in 2017, at the LangFest conference in Montreal. It’s a pretty great app, though it took me a while to warm up to it. And brushed up on my Lingala, Albanian and Marathi.
I learned a bit of Luxembourgish this weekend.
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