Duolingo has sparked a furious transatlantic row after representing the English language with an American flag – before doubling down by calling football “soccer”.
The language-learning app displayed the Stars and Stripes alongside its English course while using the national flags of Spain, France and Brazil for Spanish, French and Portuguese.
There was no Union flag or Cross of St George in sight.
When the decision was called out by a popular British social media account, Duolingo refused to back down and inflamed the row further by insisting on using the word soccer, the American name for football, as reported by CreatorZine.
The spat has now been seen millions of times, with other major brands joining the argument and users debating which country can claim ownership of the English language.
The row began when No Context Brits shared a screenshot of Duolingo’s course menu on X.
“Fix this immediately, @duolingo,” the account demanded.
The post, shared on 4 August, quickly racked up more than 5.3m views.
Duolingo could have explained the decision, promised to review the icon or simply ignored the post.
Instead, it chose violence.
‘No – and it’s soccer,’ Duolingo fired back.
The blunt response turned a minor complaint about the app’s design into a full-blown culture war involving flags, spelling and the correct name for football.
US dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster then entered the dispute on Duolingo’s side.
“No, don’t,” the account wrote in response to the threat of British spellings, attracting 132,000 views and 2,900 likes.
Duolingo then threatened to take its Americanisation of the language even further.
“Should I start saying coloUr and favoUrite next? smh,” Duolingo wrote in another post, which attracted more than 169,000 views and 6,700 likes.
Duolingo also reminded its followers that its beef with Britain “runs deep” by sharing an earlier exchange in which it cheekily responded to an account named United Kingdom saying it had deleted the app.
“Learning languages is good for you colonizer,” Duolingo replied.
No Context Brits hit back by sharing an old Steam installation screen that divided the language into “English (Traditional)” alongside a Union flag and “English (Simplified)” next to the American flag.
The meme is a long-running favourite among British social media users, who argue that American English is an edited version of the original.
Merriam-Webster later shared a Google AI result which claimed Noah Webster published his American dictionary before the first instalment of the Oxford English Dictionary appeared.
Social media users quickly divided into rival camps, with British viewers defending football and American users celebrating Duolingo’s response.
“Time to uninstall this bird again, how dare you say that,” one Brit wrote.
Another user insisted: “It’s football for crying out loud.”
But others backed Duolingo’s refusal to change its terminology.
“Duolingo knows who is the most important English-speaking country,” Finding The Truth commented.
Another wrote: “Ha, soccer’s the one hill worth dying on, calling it football just confuses everyone outside Europe.”
Campfire Legends was so impressed by the comeback that they joked: “Incredible lmao. I just bought another year’s subscription.”
A separate user concluded: “Brits getting bullied by Duolingo is tough to come back from.”
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