Guess the Language
Read a sentence. Name the language.
About this game
How to play
- Every day you get a short text in a mystery language: a passage from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has been translated into hundreds of languages.
- You have 6 guesses to name the language. The answer is always one of the roughly 95 most-spoken languages in the world.
- Type freely: small typos are forgiven, and you do not have to pick from the suggestions. A circle means your guess is in the same language family as the answer.
- Hints unlock as you miss: the language family after 3, the first letter after 5. Win to keep your streak, or switch to practice mode for endless snippets.
Where the mystery text comes from
Every snippet is a passage from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United Nations has had translated into more languages than any other document. That makes it a rare parallel corpus: the same meaning expressed in 95 languages, so the only thing separating one round from another is the language itself. The UDHR text is public domain.
Because every passage says roughly the same thing, you cannot shortcut the answer by recognizing the subject matter. What you are actually reading is script, orthography, and word shape.
How to narrow a language down
Start with the script. Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari, Greek, Hebrew, Thai, Hangul, and the Chinese and Japanese scripts each cut the field enormously on sight. Within the Latin alphabet, the diacritics do the work: a language with ă and ș is almost certainly Romanian, ő and ű point to Hungarian, ł and ż to Polish, å, ø, and æ to Danish or Norwegian.
Then look at function words and endings, which repeat far more than content words. Frequent "de" and "la" suggest a Romance language; a trail of long compound nouns suggests German or Finnish; words ending in vowels with doubled consonants suggest Italian or Finnish.
Use the family feedback deliberately. A circle means your guess sits in the same family as the answer, so guessing a language you are confident about is worth more than a wild stab even when it is wrong: a circle on Spanish tells you the answer is Indo-European, and a blank tells you to abandon half of Europe.
Common questions
- Is Guess the Language free?
- Yes. It is free, needs no account, and has no play limit. The daily puzzle is one round, and practice mode serves unlimited snippets.
- How many guesses do you get?
- You get 6 guesses. After three misses the language family is revealed, and after five you get the first letter of the language name.
- How many languages can appear?
- 95 languages are in the pool, drawn from the most widely spoken languages in the world. Obscure languages never appear as the answer, so a round is always winnable by someone who knows the major languages.
- What does the circle next to a guess mean?
- A circle means your guess belongs to the same language family as the answer, for example guessing Portuguese when the answer is Italian. It is the game's main clue, and it makes a confident wrong guess genuinely useful.
- What text is used for the snippets?
- Every snippet comes from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which exists in translation in hundreds of languages and is in the public domain. Because each passage carries the same meaning, the content never gives the language away.
- Does everyone get the same language each day?
- Yes. The daily snippet is seeded from the calendar date, so every player sees the same language on the same day, rolling over at your local midnight.