Abstract
Interest in learning Georgian is at an all-time high and still accelerating, and the infrastructure for learning it has not caught up. This first annual report assembles the evidence: worldwide search interest for "learn georgian" ran 141 percent higher in the first half of 2026 than a year earlier[1], against the backdrop of positive net migration for a second consecutive year[2], 133,857 foreign citizens counted as permanent residents in the 2024 census[3], and a record 5.52 million overnight tourist visits in 2025[4]. On the supply side, 9 of 14 major learning platforms offer no Georgian at all, three online marketplaces list 85 Georgian tutors for the entire world, and our companion benchmark finds AI reads Georgian reliably while still producing it reliably only at the top of the model range. Every figure in this report traces to a published source ledger with archived originals, and all data is free to reuse under CC-BY.
1. Introduction
No one has ever counted the world's Georgian learners, and this report does not pretend to. What it does is assemble every demand proxy and supply measure that can be verified from primary sources: search interest, migration and residence statistics, tourism, platform catalogs, tutoring marketplaces, prices, and the state of AI support, each traced to its source in a downloadable ledger. We publish it annually because the picture is changing fast enough to deserve a yearly measurement, and we publish the data openly because we needed this report and could not find it anywhere.
Two words about who we are, up front. EasyGeorgian builds courses for learning Georgian, which means we profit if more people learn it and we look good when the supply gap looks big. The defenses are the same as in our benchmark work: primary sources for every figure, archived copies, published data, and the one bullet in this report that mentions our own prices says so out loud.
2. Methodology and data sources
Every figure was collected from the named primary source on the access date recorded in the source ledger, which now contains over 240 entries with the underlying pages and tables archived. Google Trends values are relative indices, so they are always anchored with absolute figures and compared half-to-half, never partial-year to full-year. First-party EasyGeorgian data appears as shares only, never counts, and is never extrapolated beyond our own users. Marketplace numbers are listings on the access date, not unique teachers. Where a widely circulated figure is outdated or measures something different from what people think, we say so in place rather than repeating it. The full limitations discussion sits in Section 10.
3. The demand wave
Search interest, the full series. We pulled Google Trends worldwide monthly data for 2015 through mid-2026 and averaged it by year, for both of the terms a would-be learner actually types. The two series tell one story in two phases.
| Year | "learn georgian" | "georgian language" |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 23.8[5] | 16.6[6] |
| 2016 | 22.8[5] | 17.7[6] |
| 2017 | 21.6[5] | 19.8[6] |
| 2018 | 18.9[5] | 19.8[6] |
| 2019 | 17.1[5] | 21.0[6] |
| 2020 | 16.2[5] | 20.1[6] |
| 2021 | 17.2[5] | 20.4[6] |
| 2022 | 22.7[5] | 27.8[6] |
| 2023 | 25.8[5] | 35.5[6] |
| 2024 | 26.3[5] | 36.7[6] |
| 2025 | 39.4[5] | 49.7[6] |
| 2026 (Jan-Jun only) | 70.5[5] | 81.0[6] |
Yearly means of monthly index values, each term on its own 0-100 scale (peak month = 100). 2026 is a partial year and is only compared half-to-half below.
The first phase is the pre-wave decade. "Learn georgian" declined for five straight years, from 23.8 in 2015 to a series low of 16.2 in 2020[5]. Interest in this language was not building. It was fading. The second phase starts in 2022, when both terms jump together, and steepens hard: "learn georgian" rose 50 percent in 2025 alone[5], and the first half of 2026 (70.5) ran 141 percent above the first half of 2025 (29.2)[1]. "Georgian language" shows the same acceleration on a bigger base, with H1 2026 at 81.0 against 34.3 a year earlier[1]. Every all-time peak in the window sits inside 2026: February 2026 for "georgian language"[6] and May 2026 for "learn georgian"[5].
Where the interest registers. Google's country index needs careful reading. It normalizes by each country's total search volume, so it measures how prominent a term is in a country's own search mix, not where the most searches happen[5]. On that measure Georgia itself scores 100[5], Armenia 4[5], and Canada, Lebanon, the UAE and Qatar tie at 2[5]. Read plainly: the people most intent on learning Georgian, relative to everything else they search, are the people already in the country. That matches what the migration data says next.
Figure 2 · Net migration, Georgia, 2012-2025
Immigrants minus emigrants per year. Eight consecutive negative years, then the 2022 break.
Source: Geostat migration tables (archived XLSX) | Chart: State of Georgian Learning 2026.
The people behind the searches. Geostat's net migration series shows why the demand curve bent when it did:
| Year | Net migration | Year | Net migration |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | -21,521[2] | 2019 | -8,243[2] |
| 2013 | -2,606[2] | 2020 | +15,732[2] |
| 2014 | -6,543[2] | 2021 | -25,966[2] |
| 2015 | -3,408[2] | 2022 | +54,509[2] |
| 2016 | -8,060[2] | 2023 | -39,207[2] |
| 2017 | -2,212[2] | 2024 | +14,386[2] |
| 2018 | -10,783[2] | 2025 | +17,127[2] |
For every year from 2012 to 2019, Georgia lost people on net[2]. The 2020 plus sign is pandemic return migration[2]. Then 2022 delivers +54,509, a swing of roughly 80,000 people against the prior year, at a rate of +14.7 per 1,000 residents[2]. Gross inflows tell the same story at larger scale: immigration ran between 69,063 and 96,864 per year across 2012-2019[7], then hit 179,778 in 2022 and 205,857 in 2023 before settling at 135,811 in 2024 and 131,501 in 2025[7].
Figure 3 · Immigrant arrivals by citizenship, 2021-2025
Three waves inside the wave. Arrivals, not net; many later left.
Source: Geostat table 33 (archived XLSX) | Chart: State of Georgian Learning 2026.
The citizenship breakdown shows three distinct waves inside the wave:
| Immigrant arrivals | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Russian citizens | 10,881 | 62,304 | 52,627 | 23,574 | 20,139[7] |
| Ukrainian citizens | 2,006 | 20,716 | 7,516 | 6,898 | 6,937[7] |
| Belarusian citizens | 1,583 | 13,361 | 3,557 | 2,451 | 1,938[7] |
| Indian citizens | 1,400 | 3,948 | 8,406 | 4,594 | 5,685[7] |
Russian-citizen arrivals peaked immediately at 62,304 in 2022 and have eased every year since[7]. By 2024 the Russian flow had turned to net outflow (25,612 departures against 23,574 arrivals) and 2025 was roughly balanced[7]. Ukrainian and Belarusian arrivals spiked the same year and then subsided[7]. Indian arrivals followed a different clock, peaking a year later at 8,406 in 2023[7]. And a third, quieter series matters for language demand: Georgian citizens themselves. Their net movement went -40,825 (2021), -46,397 (2022) and a record -71,584 (2023), then flipped positive at +842 in 2024 and +3,274 in 2025[7]. Returning families bring non-Georgian-speaking partners and children with them, a learner segment nobody markets to.
Who stayed. Flows are noisy, so the 2024 census is the anchor. It counted 133,857 foreign citizens permanently resident in Georgia, 3.4 percent of a population of 3,929,581, counting permanent residents[3]. The composition: Russia 37,715, about 1 percent of the whole population[3], India 23,925, up from 446 Indian citizens in the 2014 census per press readings of the Geostat data[8], Ukraine 11,542[3], Azerbaijan 8,309[3] and Armenia 5,381[3], followed by Turkey 5,262, Belarus 4,473, Iran 4,322, Israel 3,244 and Jordan 3,037 as read from the census chart by Civil.ge[8]. The widely quoted preliminary figure of roughly 257,000[8] foreign residents counted a broader population and was superseded by the final June 2026 results[3]. Reports still citing it are counting a different thing.
Figure 4 · Overnight tourist visits, 2023-2025
2025 set the all-time record at 5.52 million (+8.4 percent).
Source: GNTA/Geostat annual releases (archived) | Chart: State of Georgian Learning 2026.
Tourism, three metrics, one direction. Georgia's border statistics distinguish traveler trips (all border crossings), visitor trips (non-resident travelers aged 15 or older staying under one year)[9], and tourist trips (visits with at least one overnight stay).
| Metric | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 Q1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traveler trips | 7,072,220[9] | 7,368,149[9] | 7,803,239[9] | 1,300,505 (-1.1%)[10] |
| Visitor trips | 6,171,540[9] | 6,456,064[9] | 6,856,809[9] | 1,170,362 (-0.2%)[10] |
| Tourist (overnight) trips | 4,669,467[11] | 5,091,732[9] | 5,521,866[9] | 997,529 (+4%)[10] |
2025 set the all-time overnight record at 5.52 million tourist trips, up 8.4 percent[9], with $4.69 billion in revenue from international travelers, up 6 percent on 2024[9]. The composition is shifting toward the kind of visit that motivates learning a few words: tourists made up 75.7 percent of visitor trips in 2023, against 65.8 percent in 2019[11], and in Q1 2026 overnight tourist visits grew 4 percent even as total border crossings dipped slightly[10].
The sequencing across all three datasets is the finding. Residence flows surged in 2022, the resident foreign population consolidated through the 2024 census, and search interest in learning the language broke out in 2025-2026, after the movers had settled in[5]. People do not study a language for a border crossing. They study it once the move turns out to be permanent. This report presents the statistics only. Residence politics are outside its scope.
4. Who is learning, and why
Public data answers "how many might need Georgian." It does not say why individual learners start. Our platform data does, with the caveat stated plainly: this is EasyGeorgian's own onboarding cohort (as of 2 July 2026), self-selected toward English-speaking, app-comfortable beginners. We publish shares, not counts, and we do not extrapolate them to all learners.
EX-7a · Why EasyGeorgian users start
Share of onboarding answers, EasyGeorgian users only, never extrapolated.
Source: EasyGeorgian onboarding data as of 2026-07-02 | per-question N stated.
EX-7b · Level at start
93.3% begin at a beginner tier.
Source: EasyGeorgian onboarding data as of 2026-07-02.
- Why they start: living in Georgia 60.8% · a Georgian partner or family 15.9% · travel 11.7% · curiosity 6.7% · studies 4.6% · moving to Georgia 0.4%.
- Level at start: complete beginner 58.0% · a few phrases 20.3% · knows the alphabet 15.0% · conversational or better 6.6%.
- How they found us: Facebook 33.2% · Instagram 31.4% · other channels 11.8% · Google 9.3% · word of mouth 6.8% · YouTube, TikTok and Reddit 7.5% combined.
A second, older data point agrees on the shape: a 2024 survey of 80 expats in Georgian Facebook groups, run before EasyGeorgian existed (small, self-selected, directional only), found the same dominance of live-here motivation over travel or curiosity. (Both datasets are labeled in the charts.)
5. The supply gap
Demand is one half of the story. The other half is what a motivated learner actually finds when they go looking. We audited the supply side on 2 July 2026 in three layers: the consumer app shelf, the online tutor market, and the institutional routes. Every evidence page is archived in the source ledger.
EX-5 · Georgian tutor listings vs Spanish, per marketplace
Bars show Georgian listings. The parenthetical gives the same platform’s Spanish listings and the ratio.
Source: platform listings, 2026-07-02, pages archived | Chart: State of Georgian Learning 2026. Listings, not unique tutors.
5.1 The app shelf: fourteen platforms, checked against their own catalogs
We checked each platform against its official catalog, not against third-party listicles. Nine of the fourteen offer no Georgian at all (one of those keeps a course-less landing page), and five support it, all of them niche players.
| Platform | Georgian? | Evidence note (official source, archived 2026-07-02) |
|---|---|---|
| Duolingo | No | Official course-catalog API returns 312 courses across 44 learning languages with zero Georgian entries, the complete catalog rather than a marketing page[12] |
| Babbel | No | Homepage states 14 languages and lists all of them, no Georgian[13] |
| Rosetta Stone | No | Homepage states 25 languages and enumerates the full catalog, including Farsi, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish and Tagalog, no Georgian[14] |
| Pimsleur | No | Full language catalog embedded in the homepage, 50+ languages including long-tail entries like Albanian, no Georgian[15] |
| Mango Languages | No | Dedicated Available Languages page runs from Ancient Greek to Yiddish and includes neighbors Armenian and Azerbaijani, no Georgian[16] |
| Drops | No | Catalog of 55+ languages includes Ainu, Hawaiian, Maori and Icelandic, no Georgian[17] |
| Mondly | No | Homepage states 41 languages including Afrikaans, Persian and Urdu, no Georgian[18] |
| Busuu | No | All 14 course links present on the homepage, Arabic through Turkish, no Georgian[19] |
| Memrise | No | landing page exists but no Georgian course; earlier community content discontinued (verified July 2026) |
| Ling | Yes | Homepage names Georgian among the "rare and underrepresented languages" it teaches, with a dedicated course link[20] |
| uTalk | Yes | Georgian present in the store's language data within a claimed 150-language catalog, phrase-based rather than a structured course[21] |
| Glossika | Yes | Georgian course present in the homepage course grid with no coming-soon marker[22] |
| Clozemaster | Yes | Georgian present as a target language, content is sentence-based gap-fill[23] |
| LingQ | Yes | Georgian in the homepage language grid with a direct signup link, a reader-style import tool rather than a course[24] |
The pattern in the No column matters. These platforms do carry small languages when they choose to. Mango teaches Georgia's two immediate neighbors, Armenian and Azerbaijani, while skipping Georgian[16], and Drops carries Ainu, Hawaiian and Maori[17]. Absence is a decision, not a law of nature.
Below the commercial shelf sits the do-it-yourself layer. AnkiWeb, queried through the same backend endpoint its shared-decks page uses, returns 27 community-shared Georgian decks, all user-generated, including one scraped from Ling[25]. On the tutoring side, AmazingTalker does not offer Georgian at all: the Georgian tutors URL returns a 404 and the language is absent from its homepage list[26].
5.2 Why Duolingo was never coming: the 167-of-200 analysis
The Duolingo zero deserves a proper method note, because the point it proves is bigger than Georgian.
Method. We took the Ethnologue 200, the 27th-edition ranked list of the world's 200 most-spoken languages, retrieved as a complete 200-record dump from the page's own public search index, spanning rank 1 (English, 1,515,231,760 total users) to rank 200 (Mewari, 4,210,000)[27]. We crossed it with Duolingo's course inventory, 298 course rows covering 40 natural learning languages, archived from duolingodata.com and flagged as an unofficial but complete mirror[28]. The language mapping is manual and documented in the method file, for example Duolingo's "Chinese" maps to Mandarin and "Arabic" to Standard Arabic, which is why we grade the derived counts "likely" rather than "verified" in the ledger[27].
Result. Only 33 of the 200 most-spoken languages on Earth, 16.5 percent, have a Duolingo course[27]. The other 167, 83.5 percent, do not[28]. Meanwhile seven of Duolingo's languages (Hawaiian, Irish, Latin, Navajo, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Yiddish) sit outside the top 200 entirely[27], so course selection tracks cultural pull, not just speaker count. Georgian, with 3.76 million native speakers[29] plus roughly 150,000 second-language speakers[29], falls below the 4.21 million floor of the top 200, meaning at least 200 languages have more total speakers[27]. When five in six of the languages bigger than yours went unserved, your language was never in line.
5.3 Counting the tutor market
We censused every Georgian tutor listing on the three global marketplaces that carry the language, same day, same method, with Spanish as the scale reference.
| Marketplace | Georgian tutors | Georgian rates (USD per lesson) | Spanish tutors | Spanish : Georgian |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| italki | 26[30] | $10.00 to $45.00, median of listed minimums $19[30] | 2,351[31] | 90.4 : 1[30] |
| Preply | 56[32] | $9 to $32, platform average $17[32] | 13,936[33] | 248.9 : 1[32] |
| Verbling | 3[34] | $19, $22, $25, one teacher each[34] | 363[35] | 121 : 1[35] |
| AmazingTalker | 0, language not offered[26] | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Combined | 85 listings[32] | 16,650[32] | 195.9 : 1[32] |
Three details from inside those numbers. Preply shows an aggregate 5.0 rating across 537 reviews for its Georgian tutors across 537 reviews[32]. All three Verbling teachers are based in Georgia[34]. And pricing converges across platforms: Preply's embedded price histogram crosses the 50 percent mark in the $15.95 to $17.80 bucket[32], next to italki's $19 median[30] and Verbling's $22 middle teacher[34]. The market prices a Georgian lesson at roughly $17 to $22 mid-range regardless of venue. One honesty note we repeat wherever this table appears: 85 is a count of listings, not of unique humans, since at least one teacher appears on two platforms[32].
5.4 Universities and the state
Formal instruction inside Georgia exists, but almost none of it is built for the foreign resident. Ilia State University's Language Centre lists Georgian for foreigners among its courses, 15 weeks at 6 hours per week, priced as the tuition fee of six semester credits[36]. The 225 GEL figure on the same page belongs to the Centre's exam-preparation courses, 15 weeks at 2 hours per week, and we cite it only as a comparator, not as the Georgian course price[36].
The state's own language program runs through the Zhvania School of Public Administration: state-funded tracks from A1 through B1+, with a participation counter of 16,600 on the school's site, aimed primarily at ethnic-minority citizens and public servants rather than at foreign residents[37]. The one no-cost resource with government provenance that does face foreigners is the US Peace Corps Georgian material, mirrored free by the Live Lingua Project: 2 courses, 2 ebooks, 13 audio files and 21 videos[38], teaching artifacts of their era rather than a modern curriculum.
Put the three layers together and the shape of the gap is clear. The global app industry left Georgian to five niche players, the worldwide tutor pool fits in one classroom, and the institutions that do teach the language mostly serve other audiences. A record number of people are arriving at a door with very little behind it.
6. The cost of learning Georgian
The yardstick
Every price below needs a denominator, and the only widely used one is the U.S. Foreign Service Institute's training estimate. FSI places Georgian in Category III, its "hard languages" tier, defined as languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English[39]. The published figure is approximately 44 weeks and 1,012 class hours to professional working proficiency[39]. That figure understates the real time commitment: a typical FSI week pairs 23 class hours with 17 hours of directed self-study, so the wall-clock investment runs substantially above the class-hour count[39]. For scale, FSI's Category I languages (French and Spanish among them) run 24 to 30 weeks and 552 to 690 class hours[39], Category II runs about 36 weeks and 828 hours[39], and Category IV (Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean) runs 88 weeks and 2,200 hours[39]. Georgian sits at roughly 1.5 to 1.8 times the class hours of a Category I language[39] and about 46 percent of Mandarin's[39].
EX-8 · What each route costs (illustrative, USD)
Midpoints of the ranges in section 4. Routes are different products, not equivalents; many learners combine them.
Sources: marketplace rates + school price pages + publisher prices, all in the source ledger, accessed 2026-07-02. GEL converted at NBG rate.
The priced landscape
What Georgian instruction actually costs, as listed on 2 July 2026, in the currency each provider quotes (source pages archived in the ledger):
| Option | Price as listed | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| italki online tutors (26 listed) | $10.00 to $45.00 per hour lesson, median of listed minimums $19.00[30] | per-teacher minimum prices across all 26 profiles |
| Preply online tutors (56 listed) | $9 to $32, platform-stated average $17 per lesson[32] | platform stats block on the listing page |
| Verbling online tutors (3 listed) | $19, $22 and $25 per hour, one teacher each[34] | embedded price points, all three teachers |
| NovaMova, Tbilisi (group immersion) | EUR 195 per week for 15 x 45-min lessons, EUR 260 for 20[40] | weekly intensive, group max 10 |
| NovaMova, Tbilisi (individual) | EUR 300 per week for 10 x 45-min lessons, EUR 450 for 15 and EUR 600 for 20[40] | weekly intensive, one-to-one |
| Languages & Tourism Centre, Tbilisi (one-to-one) | EUR 200 to EUR 350 per week for 10 to 25 x 45-min lessons[41] | materials and certificate included |
| SpeakUp Language Center, Tbilisi (group) | $198 to $317 per month for 12 x 90-min lessons[42] | group max 5, international-student pricing |
| Yolo.ge lesson package, Tbilisi | 275 GEL for 8 hours, about 34.4 GEL per hour[43] | sold as a gift-experience package |
| Ilia State University Language Centre | fee of 6 semester credits for a 15-week, 6-hours-per-week course[36] | credit-based, GEL amount not published on the page |
| Reference grammars | Aronson $44.95 at the publisher[44], $40.84 on Amazon[45], Hewitt $53.72[46] | new-copy prices, used copies from $25.16[45] and $37.64[46] |
| Peace Corps materials (Live Lingua) | free: 2 courses, 2 ebooks, 13 audio files, 21 videos[38] | public-domain U.S. government materials |
One comparator worth flagging honestly: the same Ilia State page prices its DELE and TestDaF exam-prep courses at 225 GEL for 15 weeks at 2 hours per week, but that figure applies to the prep courses, not to Georgian for foreigners[36]. The state also funds Georgian instruction through the Zhvania School's State Language program, which primarily serves ethnic-minority citizens rather than foreign residents[37].
What the routes add up to
The table below prices two illustrative hour counts: 300 hours, a substantial commitment that many learners would recognize, and 1,012 hours, the full FSI Category III class-hour count[39]. The arithmetic is stated so it can be checked. We convert 45-minute lessons to clock hours (20 lessons of 45 minutes = 15 hours) and treat one class hour as one hour.
| Route (rate basis) | 300 hours | Time at cadence | 1,012 hours | Time at cadence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Online one-to-one at Preply's $17 average[32] | $5,100 (300 x 17) | just under 2 years at 3 h/week, just under 3 at 2 h/week | $17,204 (1,012 x 17) | about 6.5 years at 3 h/week |
| Online one-to-one at italki's $19 median[30] | $5,700 (300 x 19) | same cadence | $19,228 (1,012 x 19) | same cadence |
| Tbilisi group school at SpeakUp's monthly fee, 18 class hours/month[42] | $3,300 to $5,283 ($11.00 to $17.61 per class hour) | about 17 months | $11,132 to $17,822 | about 56 months |
| Tbilisi group immersion at NovaMova's EUR 260 week, 15 h/week[40] | EUR 5,200 | 20 weeks, full-time | about EUR 17,540 | about 67 weeks, full-time |
| In-person one-to-one intensive at EUR 350 for 25 lessons/week[41] | EUR 5,600 | 16 weeks, full-time | about EUR 18,890 | about 54 weeks, full-time |
Two honest caveats govern this table. First, 300 hours is an illustrative scenario, not a proficiency guarantee: hours-to-conversational varies widely by learner, method and intensity, and learners aiming at comfortable daily conversation need far less than the full FSI target, which was built for diplomats reaching professional working proficiency[39]. Second, the routes are not interchangeable products. A tutor adapts in real time, a group class adds peers and schedule pressure, a grammar on the shelf costs $45 once[44] and teaches nothing by itself, and free Peace Corps PDFs[38] demand the most self-direction of all. What the table shows is the shape of the market, not a ranking: getting a meaningful number of instructed Georgian hours costs thousands of dollars or euros by every priced route, the cheapest per-hour options are Tbilisi group classes at roughly $11 to $18 per class hour[42], and the full FSI hour count exceeds $17,000 at online tutoring rates[32]. Many learners sensibly combine routes, and none of these figures says otherwise.
7. AI and Georgian in 2026
Summary of our companion Georgian AI Benchmark (230 original items, 9 dimensions, 8 AI models plus Google Translate, open dataset and methodology. Grammar tasks are scored by exact match and translation by a three-judge MQM panel with published bias controls, and benchmark figures carry their own ledger rows citing the benchmark data files):
EX-6 · Georgian AI Score, three statistical tiers
Composite of 55% deterministic grammar + 45% judged translation. Within a tier, differences are inside the error bars.
Source: Georgian AI Benchmark v2026.07, results dataset | All systems via production APIs at temperature 0 where supported.
- Every tested system, frontier and budget alike, scored above 96 on translation, and Google Translate's newest tier scored 99.7. Reading Georgian is close to solved.
- Producing Georgian is not: verb morphology spread from 97.5 (Claude Opus 4.8) down to 57.5 (Claude Haiku 4.5), failing on exactly the traps learners know: ergative subjects, animate possession, object case in the aorist series.
- Only two systems rendered the official romanization perfectly (Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Fable 5 at 100). GPT models scored 55-60 and systematically drop the ejective apostrophes.
- On the benchmark's frontier tier, fifty rare-morphology tasks from real Georgian text, the best system scores 90 and most flagships land between 36 and 60. The hard tail of Georgian is unmistakably not solved.
- Models occasionally fabricate grammar facts with full confidence. One budget model asserted Georgian has five cases in both runs we made. It has seven. Three different systems mis-wrote the official romanization of the same letter the same way.
- Every mainstream translation service now covers Georgian, in its second tier at DeepL and Azure: DeepL added it only in November 2025 without premium features, and Azure excludes it from its custom and LLM tiers. Coverage arrived. Parity did not.
Practical rule for learners: trust AI to help you understand Georgian, verify anything it produces, and treat romanized output with suspicion. (Full methodology, dataset and changelog at the benchmark page.)
8. The Georgian language, by the numbers
This is the reference section. When a journalist, a teacher or a fellow learner needs the canonical figures on Georgian, these are the ones we stand behind, each traceable to the source ledger.
Speakers. Georgian has 3.76 million native speakers by the Ethnologue 27th edition estimate[29], plus roughly 150,000 second-language speakers (a 2014 estimate), which puts total users near 3.9 million[29]. Estimates range up to nearly 5 million when the count follows ethnic-Georgian population, roughly 4.2 million in Georgia and half a million abroad[47]. We use 3.9 million as the working figure and treat 5 million as the upper bound. The language itself is thriving: Ethnologue rates its vitality Institutional, as the official national language of Georgia[48], a country whose 2024 census counted 3,929,581 residents[3].
The top-200 position. Size explains most of the supply gap in section 5, so we pin it down precisely. The smallest language on the Ethnologue 200 list, Mewari, has 4,210,000 total users, above Georgian's roughly 3.91 million, so Georgian falls outside the top 200 and at least 200 languages have more speakers[27]. For scale, English tops that list with just over 1.5 billion total users[27]. And size alone would not have saved Georgian: 167 of those 200 bigger languages have no Duolingo course either[28], and only 33 do[27].
The script. Modern Georgian is written in Mkhedruli, an alphabet of 33 letters with no capital letters at all[49].
The grammar. Georgian nouns decline through 7 grammatical cases[50] (per Hewitt's Georgian: A Learner's Grammar, the standard English-language reference). The verb is the famous part: the paradigm is organized into 11 screeves grouped in 3 series[51], where a screeve is a complete set of person and number forms for one tense-aspect-mood combination[51].
Difficulty, officially. The U.S. Foreign Service Institute places Georgian in Category III, its "hard languages" tier, at approximately 44 weeks and 1,012 class hours to professional working proficiency[39], one of 40 languages listed in that tier alongside Russian, Hindi, Turkish, Finnish and Hebrew[39]. The target is an ILR integrated score of 3 in speaking and listening, and a typical FSI week adds about 17 hours of self-study on top of 23 class hours, so real wall-clock time runs well past the class-hour count[39].
| FSI category | Class hours | Example languages |
|---|---|---|
| I, "close to English" | 552-690 (24-30 weeks)[39] | Danish, French, Spanish[39] |
| II | 828 (36 weeks)[39] | German, Indonesian, Swahili[39] |
| III, "hard" (Georgian) | 1,012 (44 weeks)[39] | Georgian, Russian, Turkish, Finnish[39] |
| IV, "super-hard" | 2,200 (88 weeks)[39] | Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean[39] |
Read the table both ways. Georgian takes roughly one and a half times the classroom hours of Spanish, and less than half the hours of Mandarin[39]. Hard, not impossible.
Where learners gather online. The largest Georgian-interest communities on Reddit are r/Sakartvelo with 78,102 members[52] and r/tbilisi with 41,550[53], both from August 2025 snapshots.
How the AI translation industry tiers Georgian. Every major machine-translation service now covers Georgian. Almost none covers it first-class, and the tier assignments are a finding in themselves. DeepL added Georgian around November 2025, in the expansion that took it past 100 languages[54], and its own documentation marks the language translation-only, with glossaries, style rules and translation memory all switched off[55]. Azure AI Translator shows the same shape: Georgian is supported for standard text and document translation but excluded from Custom Translator, dictionary lookup and the LLM translation tier[56]. Google Cloud Translation is the exception, carrying Georgian across all of its model tiers including custom model training[57]. The pattern matches what our benchmark found on the model side: Georgian gets coverage in year one, and parity somewhere after that.
(Every figure above carries a ledger entry with URL and access date.)
9. Outlook
The 2026 picture is a widening gap: demand indicators at record levels across every proxy we can verify, supply that a single table can hold, and AI that has crossed the reading threshold but not the production threshold. The 2027 edition will measure whether that gap starts closing, and will add what this edition could not: a spoken-Georgian frequency corpus built from real dialogue, a properly designed learner survey to replace the small 2024 one, and re-runs of the AI benchmark as models change. Corrections and additions reach us at [email protected] and are versioned publicly.
10. Notes, conflicts, and corrections
Method. Every figure was collected from the named primary source on the listed access date and recorded in the source ledger (downloadable CSV) with the underlying pages and tables archived. Google Trends values are relative indices and are only presented alongside absolute anchors, with partial-year values compared half-to-half, never to full years.
What this report does not claim. No global count of Georgian learners exists and we do not invent one. Search interest, migration, residence and tutoring supply are demand proxies. EasyGeorgian first-party data describes our users only, is published as shares rather than counts, and is never extrapolated. The 2024 survey (80 respondents, self-selected) is directional context. Where a widely circulated figure is outdated or definitionally different (the census preliminary ~257,000), we say so rather than repeat it. Tutor listing counts are listings, not unique teachers.
Conflicts. EasyGeorgian sells Georgian courses. This report exists partly because good data about our market did not. Every number is checkable against its source, which is the only durable answer to that conflict, and the one bullet where our own pricing appears says so in place.
Version and corrections. v2026.07.0. Corrections are versioned publicly. The 2027 edition adds the spoken-Georgian frequency corpus, the Georgian Learner Survey 2026, and benchmark re-runs.
(Source ledger: SOURCES.csv. Chart data: /data. License CC-BY-4.0, cite "State of Georgian Learning 2026, EasyGeorgian" with a link.)
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