What Language Is This? Dot Com!

http://whatlanguageisthis.com/

Since the language analyzer is becoming one of the most used web services that I run, the other day I was thinking that it would be cool get it its own domain (and a .com domain costs just 50 SEK (around 850 yen in normal times) anyway). So I was thinking about what domain name to get – that isn’t already taken – and well, one of the most common search phrases people use to find the language analyzer is “what language is this webpage/blog/text/whatever” and luckily whatlanguageisthis.com was available, so there it is! I think it’s quite easy to remember and very easy to tell people. 4 stars out of 5, perhaps? Pretty good.


Setting up the new site was pretty easy; it’s essentially just a php script that chdirs into the language analyzer directory and continues from there as before.

I also did another nice update: the data file that the app uses to identify the language is now downloaded after the page and all the application javascript files have loaded. That means the page should load much faster, and the user can start reading the instructions or entering text while the data is being downloaded in the background. If the user clicks “Go” before the data file is downloaded, it will stop and wait, while displaying a typical web 2.0-ish loading indicator.

I’m planning to add support for more languages soon, and improve identification of similar-looking languages even further. Anyway, here’s the url for the new site again:
http://whatlanguageisthis.com/

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44 Responses to “What Language Is This? Dot Com!”

  1. ronin1770 says:

    hi
    loved the website and its results. How about sharing code.

  2. Anonymous says:

    Gabiing malinaw
    madulom ang tanan
    gawas lang sa Batang Hesus
    nga gibantayan man nila
    sa langitnong kalinaw
    nia'ng Mesiyas karon.

    this is silent night in cebuano, Philopino language.
    The Program suggest tagalo, Philipino language, i.e. very near, but not exactly. ???

  3. Karl Henrik Falck says:

    Hi, Cebuano is currently not supported, but I'll add it in the next update (some time after New Year). Thanks for providing the sample text!

  4. Anonymous says:

    Tried entering simple Bangla phrases transliterated in English.

    I LOVE YOU = Ami tomate bhalobashi.

    I DON'T SPEAK BANGALI = Ami Bangla janna na.

    The system said it was Bosnian… Does it only pick up Bengali when written in the native characters?

    Jc

  5. Karl Henrik Falck says:

    Jc,
    Yes, unfortunately transliterated texts are not supported (as mentioned on the about page). If writing Bangla using latin script is common then I'll certainly add support for it, but I cannot find a reasonably large source of Bangla texts written in latin characters…

  6. Anonymous says:

    Thank you – Thank you!! Wonderful tool, very easy to use.

  7. AmazingK says:

    It seems a hard work for this widget to tell Chinese character. I tried to paste some Chinese character, and the result is always "unknown".

  8. Anonymous says:

    add on to firefox see lot of people using that but still very good site /software

  9. a. nahnemus says:

    is there an email address where i can send mr. falck a picture to see if he can identify the language in it? It's a small piece of writing, but so far i have had absolutely no luck identifying it. Thank you.

  10. Karl Henrik Falck says:

    a. nahnemus,

    Please send it to f [at] lck . nu (i.e. my last name falck with the a replaced by @ and add .nu)

    If I can't recognize it (which is quite probable) I'll put it on whatlanguageisthis.com and ask the visitors for help. I'm sure someone will know!

  11. THANGA MANI says:

    USEFUL WEBSITE.THANK YOU

  12. Heidi says:

    great site ! thanks

  13. Karl Henrik Falck says:

    Thanks!

  14. Anonymous says:

    天下邮,个人邮件,企业邮件,免费邮件,收费邮件,G邮局,超大附件,863智能反垃圾,个性化邮箱.
    Can anyone tell me what language this is?

  15. Karl Henrik Falck says:

    That's Chinese. I don't know why the identifier doesn't recognize that sentense… it should be easy. I'll look into it.

  16. Jeff Enaminger says:

    A spell check would make this site awesome!

  17. Anonymous says:

    Nice tool. Tried to see if it can identify Chinese and Arabic togeather. And it returned Arabic. I think would be more intresting if it can recognise mixed languages. Do you offer any APIs.?

  18. Karl Henrik Falck says:

    Anonymous,

    Thanks! There is support for identifying mixed texts, but in this case I suspect the amount of Arabic outweighed the Chinese by too much.

    I am currently working on offering different APIs, so please stay tuned…

  19. francis says:

    how can i translate Malay to English? specifically "ngiyazi ukuthi keng le oyingwetseng mo"

  20. eddotnet5000 says:

    can you provide a RESTful API to this? lots of developers could use it – including me :)

  21. Karl Henrik Falck says:

    Francis, sorry I don't know of any Malay-English translation tool… :(

    eddotnet5000,
    The resulting app should follow the REST principles since there's not really any state to represent anyway, I think. :)

  22. francis says:

    thnx Henrick, ecco un bel sito di recente ho scoperto che mi è stato utilizzato per tutto il resto. http://www.nicetranslator.com/ un altro sono i problemi con l'Esperanto, che è affascinante per me. (la lingua, non il problema!)

  23. Anonymous says:

    This is a great tool! Thanks for putitng it together. It has been extremely useful to me!

  24. Karl Henrik Falck says:

    Thanks a lot for your encouraging words!

  25. Fatima. De. PN says:

    It was really great !

    well done !

  26. chimala says:

    Hi, Very nice and it does a great job every time. Do you have a API for using this from a web service or is the code available from you. It would be nice if many people can use this in their applications.

  27. Anonymous says:

    Hi
    Can anyone translate this for me?

    como stas muchachito? ya me operaron do pie todo bien….stoy estudiando el lunes empiezo la escuela besitos..claro k me acuerdo! todo bien, ya stoy operada…todo bien

  28. Anonymous says:

    Thank you! This site is excellent! =]

  29. Anonymous says:

    wow this was really helpful thx so much :)

  30. pigeon toes says:

    Thank you very much. Have Stefan Zweig biography of Balzac written in this language.

  31. Serge says:

    Henrik, Thanks so much for this web app. It's great. Keep up the good work buddy

  32. Karl Henrik Falck says:

    Thanks a lot, Serge, pigeon toes, and everyone!

  33. commoncents says:

    i posted "La 18 ani e cam devremw sÃ-pi faci griji pentru vÃrsta ta"
    and it tranlated as Bosnian, or possibly croatian or serbian. My hunch is that it could be Aramanian. I would like to learn it but there is not much support around for it. your thoughts? i can post more if you like. my keyboard does not support all the letters and such so it's tough.

  34. Karl Henrik Falck says:

    commoncents,

    Thanks for your comment. I agree that the language is Romanian. However, it's a bit garbled (encoding problems?) and misspelled ("devremw" should be "devreme", I think).

    Romainian is supported by whatlanguageisthis.com… could you try again with the text correctly encoded and spelled? If that doesn't work, then please do let me know, so that I can improve the support for Romanian.

  35. Catherine says:

    this is so helpful! thank you!

  36. armando says:

    really cool program, im going to bookmark it :)

  37. Anonymous says:

    language name not showing properly

  38. Karl Henrik Falck says:

    Anonymous, could you please tell me what web browser software (name and version) you're using? I've heard this before but I can't reproduce it. I test the site in various versions of IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera…

  39. anirudh says:

    It rocked!

  40. anirudh says:

    Karl …Thank you so much man…I was able to impress some friends of mine who challenged me to find which language a piece of text belonged to…..

  41. Ecologio, o Relógio de Pulso Ecológico says:

    Hi, Henrik. This app is just fantastic. I've needed it for my entire virtual life (which is what? Like 14 years-old now) and I'm glad I finally found it. I'm sure you'll have conditions to improve it and I wish you the very best!

  42. Anonymous says:

    Thanks for your website it helped identify a hacker. good health to you.

  43. phil says:

    hi,
    i am doing research on languages as part of my degree, i stumbled across this website and love it!!! but i have only one query….how does the program identify what language has been used? does it use some sort of algorithm or does it just compare sections against a database of languages?? thanks

  44. Henrik Falck says:

    Hi Phil, I’m glad to hear you like the site. It’s a combination of analyzed and refined data and algorithms. Since the program runs in the browser the data needs to be very small, since it’s downloaded (otherwise the site would be slow). If it ran on the server, a large database could be used and I believe that in that case it would be much simpler to develop the algorithms, similar to how google’s language identification works; by just comparing the input to a huge database. So my software uses small, refined data with only the statistically significant (not meant in a scientific way; I’m an engineer and do things by intuition) data about each language. I’ve then hand-written a lot of algorithms to improve the results from the statistical analysis. Well that’s about it… it’s the result of years of trying out what works best, essentially. :)

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