Dyula is spoken by about 12 million people, most of whom learned it as a second language. Far more second-language speakers than native ones: it is the trade language of northern Cote d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso. Mutually intelligible with Bambara, which is counted separately.
On our measured language map, its closest relatives are Bambara, Chechen and Somali. If you speak one of those, much of the vocabulary will feel familiar from day one.
Structurally, objects usually come before their verbs.
Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Dyula sentences, aligned with their translations word by word and piece by piece, so you always see how the sentence actually works instead of memorizing flashcards. The grammar is discovered from the sentences themselves, and a spaced-repetition quiz teaches it in the order that unlocks the most of the language first. Our measured estimate for reaching conversational level from English is about 1,216 hours of study. Read how it works.
Speaker figures follow Ethnologue and national censuses, rounded; the difficulty estimate is calibrated against U.S. Foreign Service Institute data.