Duolingo
American online platform for language learning
Duolingo, Inc. is an American educational technology company that produces learning apps and provides language certification. Duolingo offers courses on 42 languages, ranging from English, French, and Spanish to less commonly studied languages such as Hawaiian, Māori, and Navajo, and even constructed languages such as Esperanto and Klingon. It also offers courses on music, math, and chess. The learning method incorporates gamification to motivate users with points, rewards and interactive lessons featuring spaced repetition. The app promotes short, daily lessons for consistent, phased practice.
Duolingo also offers the Duolingo English Test, an online language assessment, and Duolingo ABC, a literacy app designed for children. The company follows a freemium model, where some content is provided for free with advertising, and users can pay for ad-free services which provide additional features.
History
Early history
The idea of Duolingo was formulated in 2009 by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn and his Swiss-born post-graduate student Severin Hacker. Von Ahn had sold his second company, reCAPTCHA, to Google and, with Hacker, wanted to work on an education-related project.
The public source identifies “Duolingo” as american online platform for language learning. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Duolingo, American and online.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2918660. None of the 26 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Duolingo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.