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Text Language Detector

Identify the language of any text instantly

0 words

What Language Is This? Find Out in Seconds

You have a block of text and you are not sure what language it is written in. Maybe it arrived in an email, appeared in a dataset, or showed up in user-generated content. This tool identifies the language by analyzing character patterns — specifically, how often certain three-character sequences appear. Each language has a distinctive fingerprint of these patterns, and the tool matches your text against profiles for over 30 languages.

How Trigram Detection Works

A trigram is a sequence of three consecutive characters, including spaces. The word"hello" produces the trigrams"hel,""ell,""llo." Different languages produce different trigram distributions — German has many"sch" and"ein" trigrams, French has"les" and"ent," Russian has trigrams from the Cyrillic alphabet. The detector builds a trigram profile from your text and compares it to known language profiles using a distance metric.

Script Detection

For languages with unique writing systems, detection is nearly instant. Cyrillic text narrows the candidates to Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and a few others. Arabic script, Chinese characters, Japanese kana, Korean hangul, and Greek letters each point to a small group of languages. The trigram analysis then distinguishes within the group.

Privacy

All processing runs in your browser. No text is transmitted or stored.

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How does this tool detect the language? ▸
The detector uses a trigram frequency analysis approach. It breaks your text into three-character sequences and compares their frequency distribution against known profiles for over 30 languages. The language whose profile most closely matches your text is reported as the result. This method is fast, works offline, and is accurate for texts longer than a sentence.
How much text does it need? ▸
The detector works best with at least 20 to 30 words. Very short texts — a single word or phrase — may not contain enough character patterns for reliable detection. For short inputs, the tool may show lower confidence scores or suggest multiple possible languages.
What languages are supported? ▸
The tool supports over 30 languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Turkish, Romanian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Swahili, and more. Languages that use unique scripts (Cyrillic, Arabic, CJK) are typically detected with high accuracy even from short samples.
Can it detect multiple languages in one text? ▸
The tool reports the dominant language of the entire text. If your text mixes languages — for example, a paragraph in English with a French quote — it will identify whichever language makes up the larger portion. For per-paragraph detection, split the text and analyze each part separately.
Does it detect programming languages? ▸
No. This tool detects natural human languages, not programming languages like Python or JavaScript. Code snippets will typically be classified as English because variable names and keywords are English words.
How accurate is the detection? ▸
For texts longer than a sentence, accuracy exceeds 95 percent for most languages. Languages with unique scripts (Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean) are detected almost perfectly. Closely related languages with similar vocabulary (Norwegian and Danish, or Serbian and Croatian) may occasionally be confused with each other.
Is any data sent to a server? ▸
No. All processing happens locally in your browser using JavaScript. Your text is never transmitted or stored.