Detect the Language of a Text
Identify Which Language a Sentence Is Written In
Need to use Detect the Language of a Text right now?
Uses common-word frequency to identify the language instantly, across eight supported languages.
Detects English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and Hindi using common-word frequency — a lightweight heuristic, not a machine-learning model.
Features
- Runs entirely in your browser
- Privacy-first — your data is never uploaded
- Real-time, instant results
- 100% free, no sign-up required
- Works on desktop, tablet, and mobile
- No installation needed
Who uses this tool?
About Detect the Language of a Text
Figuring out what language a piece of text is written in seems trivial for a fluent reader, but comes up as a genuine technical need surprisingly often — sorting incoming messages by language before translation, checking scraped or pasted text before processing it, or just confirming a guess about an unfamiliar snippet.
This tool detects language using stopword-frequency analysis — comparing how many extremely common function words (like "the," "and," "is" in English, or "le," "de," "et" in French) appear in your text against a reference list for each supported language. It currently covers English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and Hindi, showing a confidence percentage for each match so you can see how clear-cut the detection is.
This is a lightweight, transparent heuristic — not a trained machine-learning language model — so it works best on genuine sentences and paragraphs with real function words, and less reliably on very short snippets, proper nouns, or text mixing multiple languages. For a two-word input or a string of names, there may not be enough common words present to confidently detect anything.
How it works
- Paste your text. Enter a sentence or paragraph you want to identify.
- Review the results. See each detected language with a confidence percentage, ranked highest first.
- Check for ties or low confidence. Very short or ambiguous text may show multiple close results or none at all.
Examples
French sentence
Input
Le chat est sur la table et il dort.
Output
French — 67% confidence