Detect Language API

Overview

Detect Language is an API service designed for programmatic language identification. The service processes text input to determine the language it is written in, supporting over 100 languages. It is suitable for applications requiring automated language detection, such as content management systems, customer support platforms, and data analysis tools. The API handles both short text snippets and longer documents, providing a language code and a confidence score for each detection.

The service is primarily utilized by developers and technical teams who need to integrate language detection capabilities into their software. Typical use cases include filtering user-generated content to ensure compliance, automatically routing customer support requests to agents proficient in the identified language, or preparing content for translation services by first determining the source language. The API offers a straightforward interface, primarily utilizing a single endpoint for text analysis, which can be called with individual text strings or an array of strings for batch processing.

Detect Language provides client libraries (SDKs) for multiple programming languages, including Python, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Java, and Go, to facilitate integration. The documentation includes code examples for these languages, demonstrating how to send requests and interpret responses. The service also offers a free tier, allowing developers to test and integrate the API without an initial financial commitment, with paid plans available for increased usage volumes. The API's focus on a core language detection function aims to provide a specialized tool for this specific natural language processing task.

Unlike broader NLP platforms that offer a suite of services like sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and machine translation, Detect Language specializes solely in language identification. This specialization positions it as a dedicated component for applications where accurate language detection is a prerequisite for subsequent processing steps. For instance, a content moderation system might first use Detect Language to identify the language of a comment before passing it to a language-specific moderation engine. Similarly, a global e-commerce platform could use the API to determine the language of a product review to display it correctly or flag it for translation.

The service's architecture is built to provide low-latency responses, making it suitable for real-time applications where immediate language identification is necessary. This includes interactive chat applications or live content feeds where content needs to be processed as it arrives. The API's design emphasizes simplicity and ease of use, aiming to reduce the development effort required to integrate robust language detection into various software projects. The confidence score returned with each detection allows developers to implement conditional logic, such as flagging detections with lower confidence for manual review, thereby enhancing the reliability of automated workflows.

Key features

• Language Identification: Detects over 100 human languages from text input, returning an ISO 639-1 code and a confidence score (Detect Language documentation on language codes).
• Batch Processing: Allows multiple text strings to be sent in a single API request, optimizing performance for applications processing large volumes of content.
• Confidence Scores: Provides a numerical confidence score for each detected language, indicating the probability of the detection accuracy.
• Error Handling: Includes mechanisms for handling invalid requests and API limits, returning clear error messages to assist developers in debugging.
• SDKs for Multiple Languages: Offers official client libraries for Python, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Java, and Go, simplifying integration into diverse development environments.
• Free Tier Availability: Provides a free tier for up to 5,000 detections per day, enabling testing and small-scale usage without cost.
• Usage Statistics: Offers dashboard access to view API usage and monitor detection volumes.

Pricing

Detect Language offers a free tier and various paid plans based on the number of detections per day. As of May 2026, the pricing structure is:

Volume discounts are applied automatically for higher tiers. For detailed and up-to-date pricing information, refer to the Detect Language official pricing page.

Common integrations

• Customer Support Platforms: Integrate with systems like Freshdesk or Salesforce to automatically route incoming tickets based on the detected language (Freshworks customer support solutions).
• Content Management Systems (CMS): Use for auto-tagging content language in a CMS like Notion, aiding in content organization and localization workflows (Notion's flexible workspace).
• User-Generated Content (UGC) Moderation: Incorporate into moderation pipelines to identify the language of comments, reviews, or forum posts for language-specific filtering or translation.
• Data Analysis and Business Intelligence: Analyze large datasets of text to understand the linguistic distribution of content, informing international market strategies.
• Translation Services: Act as a preprocessing step for machine translation APIs, ensuring the correct source language is provided for accurate translations.
• Event Management Platforms: Integrate with services like Everbridge to send emergency alerts in the recipient's preferred or detected language (Everbridge critical event management platform).

Alternatives

• Google Cloud Translation API: Offers language detection as part of its broader machine translation and natural language processing services, supporting a wide range of languages.
• Amazon Comprehend: Provides language detection alongside other NLP features like sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and keyphrase extraction within the AWS ecosystem.
• Microsoft Azure AI Language: A component of Azure AI Services, offering language detection, translation, and text analytics capabilities for developers building intelligent applications.

Getting started

To begin using the Detect Language API with Python, you will typically install the official client library and then make a request to detect the language of a given text. First, ensure you have Python installed, then install the detectlanguage library:

pip install detectlanguage

Next, you can write a Python script to perform a language detection. You will need an API key, which can be obtained from your Detect Language dashboard after signing up.

import detectlanguage

# Replace 'YOUR_API_KEY' with your actual Detect Language API key
detectlanguage.configuration.api_key = "YOUR_API_KEY"

text_to_detect = "Hello, how are you?"

try:
    # Detect language of a single text string
    detections = detectlanguage.simple_detect(text_to_detect)
    if detections:
        print(f"Text: '{text_to_detect}'")
        print(f"Detected language: {detections}")
    else:
        print(f"Could not detect language for: '{text_to_detect}'")

    # Example with multiple texts (batch detection)
    texts_for_batch = [
        "안녕하세요, 잘 지내세요?", # Korean
        "Ceci est un exemple en français.", # French
        "This is an example in English."
    ]

    batch_detections = detectlanguage.detect(texts_for_batch)
    print("\nBatch Detections:")
    for i, result in enumerate(batch_detections):
        print(f"Text: '{texts_for_batch[i]}' -> Detected: {result[0]['language']} (Confidence: {result[0]['confidence']:.2f})")

except detectlanguage.exceptions.DetectLanguageError as e:
    print(f"An API error occurred: {e}")
except Exception as e:
    print(f"An unexpected error occurred: {e}")

This script first sets your API key. Then, it uses detectlanguage.simple_detect() for a single text string, which returns just the language code. The second part demonstrates detectlanguage.detect() for batch processing, which returns a more detailed result including confidence scores for each detected language. Refer to the Detect Language official documentation for more advanced usage patterns and error handling.