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The Easiest Way to Identify the Language of a Text
27 October 2026
Tips for identifying a text’s language
The easiest way to identify the language of a text is to paste it into Google Translate and click Detect language.
If Google Translate is unavailable, you can try identifying the language manually by looking for distinctive letters and symbols:
- English is the only European language in which diacritics are used exclusively in loanwords.
- : (a colon in the middle of a word)—usually Swedish or Finnish
- ¡¿ (inverted exclamation and question marks)—Spanish
- å, ä—Swedish
- ã—Portuguese
- ă, ţ—Romanian
- ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ—Esperanto
- đ—Serbo-Croatian
- ė — Lithuanian
- ē, ī, ķ, ļ, ņ, ģ—Latvian
- ı, İ (a lowercase i without a dot and an uppercase I with a dot)—Turkish
- į, ų, ė—Lithuanian
- ł—Polish
- ő, ű—Hungarian
- œ—French
- ŕ, ĺ—Slovak
- ß (eszett)—German
- Þ (thorn)—Icelandic
- ů—Czech only
- ŵ, as well as ff and dd at the beginning of a word—Welsh
- ћ, ċ, ġ—Maltese
You can find more information here.
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