Language Detector

Identify the language of a piece of text, or the writing system when it isn't Latin. It looks at common words in thirteen languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Swahili and Hausa, and recognises scripts such as Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Devanagari, Thai, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.

How to use it

1. Paste a sentence or two.
2. Read the most likely language.
3. Check the confidence breakdown.
4. Try a longer text if the result is unclear.

When it helps

• Finding out what language a message is in.
• Sorting text samples.
• Choosing the right translation tool.
• Checking mixed content.

Good to know

• Short text is harder to identify, so paste a full sentence.
• Names and code in the text can confuse the result.
• Closely related languages can be mixed up.

How detection works

For languages written in Latin letters, the tool checks what share of your words appear in a list of the most common words of each language. In English that's words like the, and and of; in Spanish de, la and que. The language with the highest share wins, and the breakdown shows how close the runner-up was.

For other writing systems it counts characters by script first. If most letters are Cyrillic, Arabic or Chinese characters, it reports that directly. Japanese is spotted by the presence of kana, since Japanese mixes in Chinese characters.

Worked example: mixed signals

Paste "Ich habe a meeting at 3pm" and you'll see German and English both score. That's expected, because the sentence mixes the two. The breakdown helps you decide what you're dealing with, which is better than a single guess.

Paste a full paragraph of Swahili or Hausa and you'll see how function words such as na, ya, kwa, da and ta carry the signal. Short fragments like "sawa" or "ok" can't be identified, because they appear in many places.

Limits

Thirteen languages is a small fraction of the world's languages. If your text is in Yoruba, Igbo, Amharic or others outside the list, the tool will either pick a similar-looking language or say it can't tell. Don't rely on it for rare languages or for deciding anything important.

For long documents, a few sentences are enough. For tricky cases, a dedicated language identification service will do better, but this is a useful first check that keeps your text private.

Working with multilingual text

If a message could be in several languages, detect first, then pick the right dictionary, translator or spell checker. Mixed-language text is common in many regions, and the breakdown helps you see which languages are present.

For customer support, knowing the language quickly lets you route a message to the right person.

Mixed and short text

Chat messages, social posts and search queries are often short and mix languages. For those, treat the result as a hint and look at the breakdown, since two languages sitting close together usually means the text is mixed.

Questions