Spanish or Vanish
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About
Spanish or Vanish is a catchphrase associated with the language-learning app Duolingo and the Evil Duolingo Owl meme after a Duolingo parody account tweeted the phrase in 2019. The company later embraced the catchphrase, as it produced a short musical commercial as an April Fools' Day prank in 2024, which became a minor meme on YouTube.
Origin
On April 7th, 2019, the Twitter / X account @duolingous,[1] a Duolingo parody account, tweeted, "It’s simple, spanish or vanish." The tweet gained over 39,000 retweets and 115,000 likes in five years (shown below).
Spread
Over the following years, the phrase was used in numerous jokes building up Duolingo's reputation for aggressively reminding users to continue their language lessons, and, in particular, it was used to make various rhyming puns. For example, on September 20th, 2020, Redditor NoomynShit posted the Duolingo Owl saying "Do your Finnish or you're finished" to the subreddit /r/duolingomemes,[2] gaining over 660 points in four years (shown below, left).
On November 8th, 2023, Redditor redspike made a version for Portuguese, gaining over 380 points in eight months in the same subreddit[3] (shown below, right).
On April 1st, 2024, Duolingo released a musical number based on the phrase "Spanish or Vanish" for an April Fools' Day prank, gaining over 7 million views in two months (shown below, left). On April 7th, YouTuber fish posted a parody in which they translated the Spanish portions of the video, gaining over 615,000 views in the same timeframe (shown below, right).
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