Why Duolingo doesn’t offer Auslan or sign language

Does Duolingo have Auslan?

No. There is no Auslan course on Duolingo, and there never has been. It isn’t an Australian oversight either: Duolingo offers no American Sign Language, no British Sign Language and no New Zealand Sign Language. Across a catalogue of more than 40 languages, not one of them is signed.

That’s striking, because Duolingo is not shy about small or unusual languages. It teaches Navajo and Hawaiian. It teaches Latin, Esperanto and High Valyrian, a language invented for a television series. Since 2023 it has expanded past language entirely, adding music, maths and chess to the same app. Sign languages, used by millions of people worldwide, are still absent.

The reasons are a mix of format, pipeline and priorities.

Duolingo’s lessons are built for text and audio

Almost every Duolingo exercise comes down to reading, typing, tapping words from a word bank, listening to a recording, or speaking into a microphone. That model works because spoken languages have writing systems. You can render a French sentence as text, mark what the learner typed, and play audio for the same sentence.

Auslan has no everyday written form. There is no spelling of a sign for a learner to type and no sentence for the app to mark. A single sign carries handshape, orientation, location and movement all at once, and facial expression carries grammar on top of that. Auslan also uses the space in front of the signer to track who did what to whom, so meaning is spread across the body and through time rather than sitting in a line of words.

Teaching that properly means video of native signers, and checking whether a learner has produced a sign correctly means capturing and interpreting video of them signing back. Neither fits the exercise types Duolingo has spent 15 years refining.

To be fair to Duolingo, this is a question of investment rather than impossibility. Its music course had to teach pitch and notation, and its chess course had to teach a board. Both required exercise formats that didn’t exist in the app before. The company clearly can build new formats when it decides the audience justifies the work.

The volunteer course pipeline closed

Many of Duolingo’s smaller courses didn’t come from Duolingo staff at all. They came from the Incubator, a program that let volunteers build courses for languages the company was never going to prioritise commercially. Duolingo says roughly a thousand volunteers created more than 90 courses through it. That was the realistic route by which a language like Auslan might have reached the platform: passionate community members doing the work themselves.

That door is now shut. Duolingo ended the volunteer Contributor program, explaining that it had grown into a business making money from its courses and that standardised timelines and templates didn’t sit well with unpaid passion projects. The company has since said it is taking an “AI-first” approach to building content. Either way, new courses are now an internal prioritisation decision, and a signed language has not made the cut.

Auslan is a small audience by Duolingo’s standards

The 2021 Census was the first to prompt Australians for Auslan directly, and 16,245 people reported using it at home, up from 11,682 in 2016. The real learner audience is larger than that figure, since it includes hearing family members, teachers, health workers and interpreters. But next to the tens of millions of people studying Spanish or English on Duolingo, it is a rounding error.

That’s not an accusation, just the commercial reality of a company that has to justify building an entirely new lesson engine. It does mean, though, that waiting for Duolingo is not a strategy.

Even a sign language course probably wouldn’t help Australians

Here’s the part that gets missed. If Duolingo ever did add a sign language, it would almost certainly be American Sign Language, reflecting its largest market. That would not teach you to sign in Australia.

Auslan and ASL are not dialects of one another. Auslan descends from British and Irish signing traditions and sits in the same family as British and New Zealand Sign Language, sharing a two-handed manual alphabet. ASL comes from a French signing lineage and uses a one-handed alphabet. Comparisons of the two have found only around a third of signs identical. Our guides on Auslan versus ASL and Auslan versus BSL go into the detail.

So an ASL course on Duolingo would leave Australian learners roughly where they are now: needing an Auslan-specific resource.

Will Duolingo ever add sign language?

There is real demand. Petitions asking Duolingo to add ASL have been circulating for years, and the question comes up constantly in its community forums. But as of 2026 the company has made no public commitment to a course in any signed language, and there is no announced timeline. Its expansion into music, maths and chess shows where it has chosen to spend its new-format budget instead.

What to learn Auslan with instead

The good news is that Auslan is well served by resources built specifically for it. If you take one thing from this article, take this: the best way to learn Auslan is from a Deaf teacher. No app, including ours, changes that.

• Classes taught by Deaf teachers — the best option, and the one to build everything else around. Deaf organisations such as Deaf Connect and Expression Australia, along with TAFEs and community centres, run Auslan courses across Australia. A Deaf tutor gives you what no app can: live correction of your own signing, exposure to natural conversation at natural speed, and the culture the language belongs to. Our guide to Auslan courses compares the options and costs.
• The Deaf community — Deaf social events and Auslan practice groups are where learners stop translating in their head and start conversing. Classes teach you the language; the community is what you learned it for.
• Auslan Signbank — a free online dictionary from Macquarie University, with video for each sign. The reference to reach for when you need to check a single sign.
• Apps, including Auslearn — useful for the thing that sinks most learners, which is consistency between classes. A few minutes of daily video practice keeps vocabulary alive in a way a weekly lesson alone does not. If it was Duolingo’s daily habit you were after, an Auslan app is the closest equivalent, but treat it as practice between classes rather than a course in itself. Our guide to choosing an Auslan app covers what to look for.

Whatever mix you land on, insist on video of native signers rather than diagrams or written descriptions, because movement and facial expression are part of the sign itself. But treat good video as the floor rather than the ceiling. A recording can show you a sign correctly; only a person can tell you that yours was wrong. That is the real reason a Deaf-taught class outperforms every app on the market, and it is worth prioritising over any amount of screen time.

Frequently asked questions

Does Duolingo have Auslan?

No. Duolingo does not offer Auslan (Australian Sign Language), and there is no indication it is working on one. To learn Auslan you need a resource built for it. The strongest option is a course taught by a Deaf teacher, run by a Deaf organisation such as Deaf Connect or Expression Australia, or by a TAFE. The free Auslan Signbank dictionary and Auslan apps are useful alongside a class rather than instead of one.

Does Duolingo have any sign language courses?

No. Duolingo has never offered a course in any signed language. There is no American Sign Language course, no British Sign Language course, and no Auslan or New Zealand Sign Language course, despite long-running requests and petitions from learners.

Why doesn't Duolingo teach sign language?

Duolingo's lesson formats are built around text and audio: reading, typing, word banks, listening and speaking. Sign languages are visual and spatial, with meaning carried simultaneously by handshape, movement, the space around the signer and facial expression, so there is nothing to type and checking a learner's signing would need video. Duolingo also closed the volunteer program that produced many of its smaller courses, which removed the usual path for a community-built sign language course.

Will Duolingo add ASL or Auslan in the future?

Duolingo has not announced a course in any sign language. It has shown it can build genuinely new exercise types, having expanded beyond languages into music, maths and chess, so a sign language course is not technically impossible. But there is no public commitment to one, and an Auslan course specifically would be even further down the list than American Sign Language.

Can I use an American Sign Language app to learn Auslan?

Not effectively. Auslan and ASL are separate languages from different language families, with different grammar and a different manual alphabet: Auslan uses a two-handed alphabet while ASL uses a one-handed one. Studies comparing them have found only around a third of signs are identical. If you want to communicate with Deaf Australians, learn Auslan directly.

Sources and further reading

The factual claims in this guide were checked against the following community, government and research sources.

• Auslan User Statistics | 2021 Census — Deaf Connect
• Ending and honoring our volunteer Contributor program — Duolingo Blog
• Duolingo Launches Music and Math on Its Flagship App — Duolingo, Inc. investor relations
• Auslan Signbank — Macquarie University

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