Keoni Mahelona, chief technology officer at Te Hiku Media, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in May 2025 that his team’s bilingual speech-recognition model for te reo Māori was the best in the world for the language. He runs the operation, in his own description, from a “derelict, rundown, musky-smelling building” in Kaitaia, in the far north of New Zealand. Eight NVIDIA A100 GPUs sit inside. The model transcribes te reo at 92 per cent accuracy and handles code-switching between te reo and English at 82 per cent. It is better at understanding a small Polynesian language than several large American technology firms manage with their flagship products. The Māori-owned charity built it themselves, holding their archives back from Silicon Valley as a matter of principle.
Luis von Ahn, Duolingo’s chief executive, reported in February that the firm had crossed one billion US dollars in annual revenue for the first time, with 52.7 million daily active users at year-end. The broader language-learning market reached around 85 billion US dollars in 2025, according to Global Market Insights, a research firm. Self-paced apps now generate more than half of online learning revenue. The languages with the smallest speaker bases are, proportionally, the biggest winners of the digital boom.
The Senedd passed the Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Act in May 2025, writing into statute the target of one million Welsh speakers by 2050. The 2021 census recorded 538,300 speakers, down from 562,000 a decade earlier. That was well below the 580,000 the original Cymraeg 2050 strategy had projected for the year. The Annual Population Survey for October 2024 to September 2025 put the figure much higher, at 828,500. Census takers ask about daily use; surveys ask about ability. The new Act commits Cardiff specifically to encourage digital use of the language.
Pádraig Mac Brádaigh, the Irish-language officer at Ireland’s national student union, spoke in early December 2025 about a “surge of interest” in the language, prompted by new university courses and the Official Languages Act 2021’s target of having a fifth of public-sector workers competent in Irish by 2030. Duolingo’s Irish course now has roughly one million active learners, set against fewer than 100,000 native speakers in the Gaeltacht. Ibec, the Irish business federation, calculated in July 2024 that the number of people in Ireland able to speak Irish has risen by 71 per cent since 1991. Gaelscoileanna enrolment tripled between 1990 and 2021. Five million people outside Ireland have at some point used Duolingo to learn the language.
Adam Turaev’s Praktika announced expansion to seven new languages in May last year, building on a 35.5 million US dollars funding round and 14 million downloads. The London-based start-up bets that learners want to talk to an AI avatar rather than tap a screen. Speak, an English-tutoring app backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund, raised 16 million US dollars in August 2023, lifting its total funding to 63 million US dollars, and now operates in more than 20 countries. Memrise, Talkpal and Drops compete for the same audience with their own chatbots. Duolingo launched Video Call, its real-time AI conversation feature, in the third quarter of 2024 and made it the headline draw of its Duolingo Max premium tier.
Talking back
Von Ahn told shareholders in Duolingo’s first-quarter letter in May 2025 that the firm had launched nearly 150 new courses in three months using generative AI. Dr Jesin James and Dr Piata Allen of the University of Auckland launched their AI-powered Māori Pronunciation Coach a couple of months later, citing a 31 per cent rise in te reo uptake between 2021 and 2023. The pair aim to reach a million users within five years, starting with university courses. NVIDIA featured Te Hiku Media’s te reo speech-recognition work in a November 2024 case study, noting that the charity had trained its bilingual model on roughly a thousand hours of native-speaker audio, some of it collected from people born in the late 19th century.
The Scottish government opened applications for CivTech Round 11.2 in August 2025, a brief inviting private-sector developers to help solve the data-sparsity problem in Scottish Gaelic. The 2022 Scottish census recorded 69,701 people able to speak the language, most of them in the Outer Hebrides. UNESCO presented its Global Roadmap on Multilingualism at the Second World Summit for Social Development in 2025, urging explicit language-inclusion measures in artificial-intelligence development. The Montreal Gazette reported in December 2024 that AI-generated ‘how-to’ books for endangered languages such as Abenaki and Mi’kmaq were already on sale, riddled with errors and produced without community consent. Te Hiku Media announced a partnership with the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo’s Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani College of Hawaiian Language in early 2025 to build the first automatic speech-to-text tool for ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian language. The plan, drawing on the Māori experience, was to complete the model during 2025. The language has about 1,000 native speakers.
While technology cannot save a language on its own (a language only lives if people use it), what technology has done is strip away at least some of the friction that made preservation feel like an impossible chore.
By lowering costs, connecting fragmented groups, and offering a safe space to make mistakes, tech (notably the smartphone) has done what a century of political activism could not. It has given some of the world’s minority tongues a fighting chance.
Photo: Dreamstime.
