How to play Guess the Language
Each round has ten questions. You see a short text and four language names, and you pick the one you think it is. The first three questions are warm-ups with very different choices. After that, the wrong answers get closer to the right one, and the last three questions mix languages from the same family or the same script, such as Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, or Malay and Indonesian.
Stuck? Use a hint. Region tells you where the language is mostly spoken, and Language family tells you which group it belongs to. Each hint halves the points for that question. After every answer a lightbulb box gives a fun fact, and a postcard shows a photo from a place where the language is spoken, the language's name in its own words, where it is spoken, roughly how many people speak it and its writing system. Press Play to start at once with all 82 languages. Open Options to practice one region or to switch to Name the script and guess the writing system instead. Turn on Timer bonus for a 20 second countdown on each question: the faster you answer, the more points you get, up to double. The game remembers that choice on this device.
Clues for telling languages apart
- Look at the script first. Hebrew is blocky and Arabic is joined up, and both run right to left. Devanagari (Hindi, Nepali) hangs from a line along the top. Thai, Lao and Khmer have small loops and no spaces between words. Korean letters sit in neat square blocks, and Japanese mixes complex kanji with simple, curvy kana.
- Spot special letters. ñ points to Spanish, ß to German, ç and ã to Portuguese, and ł, ą and ę to Polish. Danish and Norwegian use æ and ø, while Swedish uses ä and ö. Icelandic still has þ and ð, and Turkish has a dotless ı.
- Check Cyrillic details. Ukrainian has і and ї, Serbian has ђ and ћ, and Mongolian has ө and ү. Russian has none of these.
- Notice common words and endings. Many Bantu languages, like Zulu and Swahili, start words with prefixes such as "aba" or "wa". Polynesian languages like Hawaiian and Maori use few consonants and many vowels.
Why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations in 1948. It has been translated into more than 500 languages, which makes it one of the most translated documents in the world. Because every version says the same thing, it is a fair way to compare languages side by side. Article 1 reads: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
Questions
How many languages are in the game?
There are 82 languages from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific, written in 23 different scripts. They range from huge languages like Mandarin and Spanish to smaller ones like Icelandic, Hawaiian and Cherokee.
Why are some texts missing accent marks?
Each text is copied exactly from a published translation. Some translations are decades old and follow older spelling rules, so you may see a few differences from how the language is written today.
What if I see boxes instead of letters?
That means your device has no font for that script. Most phones and computers made in the last few years include fonts for every script in the game. Updating your system usually fixes it.
Is my best score saved?
Yes, in this browser on this device, for each mode and region. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account.
Texts: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1, as translated and published by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), in the Unicode versions collected by the UDHR in Unicode project. Speaker numbers are rough estimates.