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Did the number of learners increase or decrease in 2016?

I would like to know based on your own personal experience, in addition to any official data that you know of.

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Definitely grown with Duolingo for En>Eo. After Espana>Eo the growth is gone to +0.7 million/year (projected on current trend). Portuguese (keen learners) is hatching @ 7%.

My Duolingo EN>EO cumulative growth snapshots since Sep'16:

+930/day on 11Nov,

+1100/day on 14Dec,

+1200/day on 14Jan...

+1350/day current.

Espana>EO (some in both EN/ES>EO) +747/day

That's ~>42.2% increase of base speakers (EN+50%ES)/2mn.

Not including other sources.

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    Do we know (1) How many of the users of the various courses are unique users? (2) How many users are established speakers who signed up for the course to see what it's like or to help answer questins? (3) Whether the behavior of these 903 or 1100 or 1200 or whatever has been consistent. That is, whether the same percentage of joiners actually become learners? (4) That the "other sources" have been consistent or also increased? Ultimately, looking at learner growth by individual year seems questionable.
    – Tomaso Alexander
    Commented Apr 6, 2017 at 22:31
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    don't have insights from Duo, other than monthly snap of learners. 1) Assume EO learners are unique. ES>EO would have dups, assume ~50%, I'm not in ES>EO). 2) no idea. I've seen experienced EO speakers in Duolingo discussions where there's no EO in their list. 3) depends what behaviour. The #s are cumulative, so 1200 is for whole period since 16Sep16. Only current was from 17Mar (less accurate/projection) 4) I haven't measured other sources, eg.~>100K from Lernu, but hard to verify overlaps, other than probably non EN/ES related languages.
    – taki
    Commented Apr 8, 2017 at 8:55
  • I wasn't expecting detailed answers. I was pointing out things that should be considered before saying that there was "definite" growth in a given year. My subjective impression is that most of the people who I see actually learning the language have been learning it for longer than they've been on Duolingo.
    – Tomaso Alexander
    Commented Apr 8, 2017 at 11:53
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Once again I'm reminded of my saying Esperanto Wasn't Born Yesterday™. Esperanto has a 130 year history and is not going to succeed or fail based on what happened in 2016. Ultimately we run into the same problems when we try to define how many speakers there are. What is a learner and how do we count them?

Your request for "official" data is a little odd, since there is no official source for data. It's not clear what "unofficial data" would be.

I recall that the Duolingo Esperanto course continues to grow with linear growth.

My personal experience is that I'm getting a lot more requests for help with Esperanto than I did 3 or 5 years ago -- but for sure that's because I'm out there more than I used to be. (I teach on italki, do translations by request, that sort of thing.)

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