Why is Duolingo attacking JK Rowling in its German lessons?

The world’s leading language app seems to have taken a highly partisan position on the trans debate.

The world’s leading language app seems to have taken a highly partisan position on the trans debate.

To those who are unaware, Duolingo is now the leading language learning app on the planet. It achieves this because it is very good at teaching languages. It is also one of the world’s most successful tech companies it’s last twelve months revenue dwarfs Spotify by 2.5 times. It achieves this by having an extremely engaging app that has customer retention rates that most tech companies can only dream about.

A significant part of this success is because it appeals to both adults and children and as a result, a lot of customers have family accounts. My daughter, 16, has a 1122 day streak on her Spanish course on Duolingo. It’s trusted by parents and customers around the world to teach languages efficiently and effectively.

We don’t, however, pay Duolingo to peddle radical trans ideology to her. Yet, this is what Duolingo seems to have been doing through subtle nudging for several years now.

Yesterday a colleague shared the following tweet with me:

It’s a paraphrase of the German below:

The actual translation is:

Magst du die Bücher mit Harry Potter als Figur?
(Do you like the books with Harry Potter as a character?)

Ja, aber meiner Meinung nach ist die Autorin gemein.
(Yes, but in my opinion, the author is mean.)

Ja, du hast recht! Ich interessiere mich für Sport.
(Yes, you're right! I'm interested in sports.)

Since Gabby Koppel’s tweet yesterday others have picked up on this including James Esses of this Parish:

Now any of us who have worked in the corporate world know that it can be very difficult for the head to know what various limbs are doing, there are legion examples of rogue activist employees and suppliers causing corporate blushes. So, if you were to give the Duolingo management the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are unaware of this, it being the action of a rogue employee and they couldn’t possibly really want to pick a legal battle with one of the world’s most wealthy and influential women through this sort of petty slander, then you may be being overtly generous: it turns out that this sentence has been on Duolingo since August 2024 with the following Facebook post praising the company for attacking Rowling:

And the agora of reason and nuanced debate that is Reddit:

Starting a thread which was full of visceral hatred aimed at the author.

So the ‘other side’ on the trans debate had clearly picked up on this 12 months ago and yet, as of yesterday it is still a feature of the German lessons.

Like many tech companies, Duolingo, founded by a Swiss, ended up a fixture of the American technical hegemony. The mono culture of essentially American professional class coastal politics and liberal values. One of the issues such companies run into is that as they service an international market they come up slap bang against other cultures where the politics of the Bay Area may not be appreciated or welcome. So last year, around the time when they were teaching students learning German that JK Rowling is a nasty horrible person, they had to remove all their LGBTQ+ and ‘queer’ content from their Russian version. I’m currently learning Arabic through the app and I have yet to run into the LGBTQ+ content in this app.

‘Pronoun tinkering’ may not be important in a language like English, but it is pretty important to get right in gendered languages like Spanish, French, Italian, Gaelic, Irish etc. Tampering with grammar essentially makes the app useless for anyone using it for serious academic study.

What’s the big deal? Well, it is this: Duolingo is trusted by millions of people, and a lot of parents, to teach them and their kids foreign languages. That is all it should be doing. If such highly controversial politicised content as this attack on Rowling is permitted by the editorial team, then what do you think that does for parental trust?

If Duolingo are content to allow such content, and that it has been on their app for a year now suggests they are, then what else are they teaching, and more importantly, what are they teaching my daughter? Can I rely on them to teach Spanish objectively and professionally or is my daughter being exposed to the political opinions and beliefs of their employees?

Duolingo have yet to respond to yesterday’s exposeé on X, I have written to their customer services asking for an explanation and reassurance that their app is suitable for my family and I am sure I am not the only one.

Duolingo is a phenomenal platform for learning languages, it is responsible for refreshing my schoolboy Latin and polishing up my Scottish Gaelic. However, it will rapidly cease to be the leading language app if the trust it has built with customers and parents especially is undermined.

So my questions are:

How did this happen?

Did you intend to personally attack JK Rowling?

It’s been on the app for 12 months, and you haven’t taken it down, why?

How am I, as a customer, meant to be reassured that you are teaching my family languages objectively and professionally, without politics, ideology or personal insults aimed at individuals?

UPDATE:
As of 11.00AM British Summer time Duolingo has issued the following statement:

Thin gruel. Whilst the apology and action is welcome it does not explain how this happened, why it has been up for over a year and what else is Duolingo teaching kids and students.