oliko se tuuli vain?

kuumaa picture of the day #695

norwegian has 5 million speakers. it has courses on any language learning platform you can think of. the norwegian learning subreddit has 58k members - a bunch of passionate learners and natives who answer questions. in the last year ive managed to find 12 books in norwegian at thrift stores, book warehouses, etc. never even bothered to get some online because of this! you can watch basically any show you want in it, or at least with subtitles.

what does swahili have? swahili has around 100~ million speakers, making it the most spoken language in africa (excluding colonizer languages like french and arabic). most platforms dont have a course for it, but the few that do are incredibly poorly made and almost impossible to use to learn with. the swahili learning subreddit has only 6.7k members (and most of these people have personal ties like family, as opposed to norwegian where people just learn it randomly for fun). i have never found ANY books IN swahili. ive found two dictionaries, and they were both at speciality stores (unlike norwegian which ive found at my usual medium sized town thrift store). virtually nothing is translated to swahili. not even the fucking Lion King, which uses words from the swahili language (hakuna matata, simba, rafiki, mufasa).

im not expecting tanzania and kenya to translate every western movie ever, they have their own stories to tell (as well as some government censorship), but thats not the whole story. the west has no interest in giving their stories to africa and they have no interest in translating african stories to english.

and like. I understand Why these disparities exist. due to colonization and therefore lower education levels, there are less books in swahili in the first place. people would rather learn a language with grammar and vocabulary similarities to their own, like an indo european language. but the difference is actually fucking absurd. a language with 100 million speakers should not have this few resources. with norwegian, i could always google any niche grammar question i had and find someone online asking the same question. with swahili, i have to search through decades old grammar guides in search of an answer on my own.

Duolingo is a great example. Not that you should take the green bird seriously and use it exclusively, but if you want to get a feel for the basics, it does the job. Now consider what's available. If I want to learn French, there are 8 sections available plus the daily refresh. The sections have been aligned with CEFR levels and go as high as B2. The French course also has the following available in the practice section (if you have super): speak, listen, mistakes, words, and stories.

Now let's compare it to a less popular and less common language like Finnish. I think I completed the entire course in one summer. It's 100% possible to do it even faster. The Finnish course has a whopping two sections that aren't even aligned with the CEFR levels, plus daily refresh. In the practice section? Listening and mistakes. That's it. You want a Finnish story? Paljon onnea! You're not getting it. And even if you complete all three sections (which are really just two), you'll get about as far as "tämä bändi svengaa kuin hirvi" (and does anyone even say this irl? probably not).

Käärijä yaps at Red Rocks Amphitheater (April 16, 2026), part 1