Language Detector

How the check works, in order

Step one is the script. Unicode groups characters into blocks by script, and the tool counts letters per block: Arabic is U+0600 to U+06FF with its supplement and extended blocks, Cyrillic is U+0400 to U+04FF plus its supplement, Greek is U+0370 to U+03FF, Hebrew is U+0590 to U+05FF, Devanagari is U+0900 to U+097F, Hiragana is U+3040 to U+309F, Katakana is U+30A0 to U+30FF, Hangul is U+AC00 to U+D7AF with its jamo blocks, and Han ideographs sit at U+4E00 to U+9FFF with Extension A at U+3400 to U+4DBF. When one script covers almost all the letters, the language is often settled at this step: Hangul means Korean, Thai script means Thai, Hebrew script means Hebrew.

Step two is the word list, and it only runs where it is needed. Latin script covers English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Czech, Romanian, Indonesian and Vietnamese, so the tool scores the text against a short list of common words for each: the, and, of for English, le, la, les, de for French, el, la, los, de for Spanish, der, die, das, und for German, and so on. Distinctive letters add a small bonus, such as ñ for Spanish, ã and õ for Portuguese, ß for German, and ğ and ş for Turkish. Cyrillic text is scored the same way for Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian, and Arabic-script text for Arabic, Persian and Urdu. The winner is the language with the highest score, the runner-up is shown beside it, and the confidence label follows the gap between them and the length of the text.