Paste a sentence or paragraph to find out what language it is written in. You get the most likely language with a confidence ranking of alternatives, the writing systems used in the text, and an optional line-by-line check for mixed-language documents.
Last updated:
Detected languagePaste some text
Ranking
Writing systems in the text
Line by line
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How to use the Language Detector
Paste your text. A sentence or two (20+ words) gives the most reliable result.
Read the detected language, its native name, ISO code and confidence.
Check the alternatives: closely related languages such as Spanish and Galician can score close together.
Look at the writing systems to see which scripts appear and how much of the text each covers.
Turn on line-by-line to detect each line separately, for example in subtitles or multilingual lists.
How language detection works
The detector works in two steps. First it classifies every letter by writing system (Unicode script). Many languages have their own script, so Korean Hangul, Thai, Georgian, Armenian, Greek, Tamil or Khmer text is identified from the letters alone, and Japanese is recognized by its hiragana and katakana. Chinese text is checked for Simplified versus Traditional character forms.
For scripts shared by many languages (Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari, Hebrew, Bengali) it compares the text with language profiles. The franc model, an open-source library, scores how well the text's three-letter sequences (trigrams such as “the”, “ing”, “ión”) match profiles of 180+ languages. The built-in detector instead counts each language's most frequent short words (“the, and, of” for English, “und, der, die” for German) and characteristic letters such as ñ, ß, ø, ł, ő or ă.
Languages that are easy to confuse
Pair or group
Why
Clues to look for
Danish / Norwegian Bokmål
Nearly identical written vocabulary
Danish af, mig, efter, hvad; Norwegian av, meg, etter, hva
Spanish / Galician / Portuguese
Shared Latin roots and endings
Spanish ñ, el, los; Galician unha, non; Portuguese ã, õ, não
Malay / Indonesian
Standard forms of one language
Malay kerana, boleh, sahaja; Indonesian karena, bisa, saja
Croatian / Serbian / Bosnian
Mutually intelligible standards
Serbian often uses Cyrillic; Croatian tko, što, Serbian ko, šta
Czech / Slovak
Close relatives
Czech ř, ů, ě; Slovak ľ, ä, ô
Russian / Ukrainian / Belarusian
Shared Cyrillic alphabet
Russian ы, э; Ukrainian і, ї, є, ґ; Belarusian ў
Hindi / Marathi / Nepali
All written in Devanagari
Hindi है, और; Marathi आहे, आणि; Nepali छ, र
Arabic / Persian / Urdu
Shared Arabic script
Persian پ چ ژ گ; Urdu ٹ ڈ ڑ ے
Tips for accurate results
Use full sentences. Names, brands, numbers and single words often exist in several languages.
Remove code, URLs and hashtags before checking; they add English-looking letter patterns.
Split mixed documents with the line-by-line option instead of checking them as one block.
Read the ranking: when the top two scores are close, the text may fit both languages.
Frequently asked questions
How does the language detector work?
It first looks at the writing system: many languages have a unique script (Greek, Korean Hangul, Thai, Armenian…). Within shared scripts it compares the text against language profiles: the franc model compares sequences of three letters (trigrams) with profiles for 180+ languages, and the built-in detector counts each language's most common words and special letters.
How much text do I need?
One short sentence is often enough for distinct languages, but 20 or more words give a reliable answer. Single words and names can belong to several languages, so the result for very short input is marked as low reliability.
Why are similar languages sometimes confused?
Closely related languages such as Danish and Norwegian, Spanish and Galician, Malay and Indonesian or Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian share most of their common words and spelling. Check the ranking: when two scores are close, both are plausible.
Which engine is used?
When your browser can load the franc library from the CDN, its trigram model ranks 180+ languages. If it cannot load (for example offline), the built-in detector covers 80+ major languages and every distinct script instantly. The result card says which engine produced the answer.
Can it detect mixed-language text?
The main result reports the dominant language. Turn on line-by-line mode to check each line separately, and the writing-system table shows when several scripts are mixed.
What are ISO 639-3 codes?
ISO 639-3 is the international standard of three-letter language codes, such as eng for English, spa for Spanish and cmn for Mandarin Chinese. They are shown so you can use the result in software and data files.
Are all the tools on FreeToolCabin tested for quality and accuracy?
Yes! Every tool on our site undergoes automated Q/A testing in real browser environments to ensure high precision, correct output, and zero errors. If you happen to spot a bug or have a suggestion, please contact us at [email protected] and our team will review it right away.