Duolingo reports a 35% increase in Spanish learners following Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show.

Bad Bunny’s performance during the Super Bowl LX halftime show has sparked greater interest in Spanish. The language learning app Duolingo, one of the most popular globally, saw a 35% rise in learners taking up the language compared to the previous week, right as the Puerto Rican artist headed toward one of the exits of Levi’s Stadium and sang “Debí tirar más fotos de cuando te tuve.”. The platform posted a graph on its X account illustrating how, at around 17.00 on Sunday, February 8, app usage dipped slightly, then surged sharply after 20.00. “Is this what a one-night stand feels like?” The message playfully queries, a hallmark of its marketing approach.

Users on X also posted screenshots of the alert they got after Bad Bunny’s show concluded: “Are you having trouble with Spanish? I can help you. Let’s have a lesson now.” One person mockingly called it “diabolical.”

Duolingo’s metrics resemble those of an entertainment app more than a learning platform. As reported by this newspaper in 2024, over 80 million people open the app monthly to learn a language, with around 24 million doing so daily. Guatemalan Luis Von Ahn, one of its founders, explained that the “secret” formula relies on methods borrowed from mobile video games and social media. “Each lesson has to last about three minutes, and people have to feel like they did well. We give each person exercises that they have an 80% chance of answering correctly,” he said at the time.

The app provides more than 280 courses across over 40 languages, and while languages are its defining feature, it also includes lessons in mathematics, music, and chess, the most recent addition to its offerings. Per its annual report, Spanish leads in user engagement, followed by English and Italian. The top 10 most popular languages last year were English, Spanish, French, Japanese, German, Korean, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, and Hindi.

In the United States, Hispanics are the largest minority group. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in July 2024, their population exceeded 68 million. Over the past five decades, “the Hispanic population has multiplied sevenfold and its relative weight has quadrupled,” as noted in the report El español: una lengua viva 2025 (Spanish: A Living Language 2025), released each year.

Based on data from The Pew Research Center, the Hispanic population is primarily concentrated in southern states like New Mexico, where 48% of residents speak Spanish; Tennessee at 41%; California at 40%; Texas at 39%; Arizona at 31%; and Florida at 27%, the states with the largest shares. Mississippi has the lowest proportion of Spanish speakers among southern states, at just 4%.

The main countries of origin for Hispanics in the United States are Mexico (58.3%), Puerto Rico (9%), El Salvador (4%), Cuba (3.9%), and the Dominican Republic (3.7%). However, between 2010 and 2023, “the relative weight of Mexican origin within the Hispanic community has fallen by 6.6 percentage points, while Central American origin has increased by 2.2%, as have South American and Caribbean origins, which have grown by 1.9% and 0.3%, respectively,” it states.

According to figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2023 alone, the growth of the Hispanic population made up nearly 71% of the nation’s overall population increase, and the share of Hispanics born in the United States has kept rising since the start of the century.

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