For years, the honest answer to “how many people are learning Georgian” was a shrug. No census counts learners. No platform publishes Georgian numbers. The language sits outside the top 200 by speaker count, which means the industry reports that cover Spanish and Japanese simply never mention it.
We got tired of the shrug. The State of Georgian Learning 2026 is the first annual report on the demand for this language and the supply available to meet it, built the way we wish someone had built it for us: every figure from a primary source, every source in a downloadable ledger, all of it free to reuse.
A few numbers that tell the story.
Search interest grew 141 percent in six months
For a decade nothing happened. Worldwide search interest for “learn georgian” spent 2015 to 2020 slowly declining. Then 2022 bent the curve, and 2026 broke it: the first half of this year ran 141 percent above the first half of 2025, and the all-time peak was two months ago.
One in thirty people in Georgia is now a foreign resident
Behind the searches are people. Net migration has been positive for two consecutive years. The 2024 census counted 133,857 foreign citizens living in Georgia permanently, about one in every thirty people in the country. And for a second consecutive year, more Georgian citizens came home than left, bringing partners and children who will meet ბებია (bebia, grandmother) at the supra and want words of their own.
One number in the report matters for what it corrects: you may have seen 257,000 foreign residents quoted in the press. That was a preliminary census figure counting a broader group, later finalized at 133,857. The report explains the difference so you can cite the right one.
The entire world has 85 online Georgian tutors
Now the supply side. Duolingo teaches 312 courses and zero of them are Georgian. Of the 200 most spoken languages on Earth, 167 have no Duolingo course either, and Georgian is not even in that 200. Nine of the fourteen platforms we audited offer nothing at all. The three major tutoring marketplaces list 85 Georgian tutors combined, against 16,650 for Spanish on the same sites. For every Georgian tutor online, there are nearly two hundred Spanish ones. We priced every learning route from grammar books to intensive schools, and the report lays the whole landscape out with sources.
We sell Georgian courses, so yes, the supply gap flatters us, and the report says so out loud in the introduction. The defense is that every number is checkable: 260 ledger entries, archived originals, and a standing correction inbox at [email protected].
AI reads Georgian now. It still cannot write it.
The report’s AI chapter summarizes our companion Georgian AI Benchmark: AI now reads Georgian reliably, still stumbles producing it, and most models cannot romanize it the way any Georgian textbook would. If you use AI in your Georgian life, that chapter is the practical guide to what to trust.
The full report, charts, data tables, and PDF are at easygeorgian.com/state-of-georgian-learning. Next year we run it all again, plus the pieces we are already building: a spoken-Georgian frequency corpus and a proper learner survey. If you want the 2027 edition to answer a question this one could not, tell us.
