Recognise the languages
Read a piece of writing and pick the language from four options. Decks are grouped by continent and by type, and they overlap on purpose.
From what you have learned
From flags you know
Study some flags first and this deck fills itself with the languages of the countries you got right, so every sample is attached to somewhere you can place on a map.
Study flagsEvery language
136 languagesEvery language with a verified written sample.
136 languages · 0 learned
By continent
The same split as the flag decks, so you can take a continent both ways. A language appears in every continent where it is spoken — which is how you learn that Portuguese belongs to Angola and Mozambique as much as to Portugal.
By type
Major world languages
The most widely spoken languages — the best place to begin.
22 languages · 0 learned
Non-Latin scripts
Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Han, Ethiopic and more — recognisable by their letters.
37 languages · 0 learned
Latin-script languages
The hard mode: same alphabet, different languages. Watch the accents and word shapes.
99 languages · 0 learned
More ways to study
Name the languages
Start a round →A country is named and you pick every language it calls its own — official, co-official or national. A point for the whole set and nothing for most of it, and where you get it wrong the grid shows you what you missed and what you added.
How samples are chosen
Every language has several samples — 1,512 in all — and a card shows a different one each time it comes back, so you cannot pass by memorising the shape of one phrase. Most are paragraphs of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, quoted from the Unicode consortium’s proofread transcriptions; smaller languages also carry a hand-checked everyday phrase.
After you answer, the letters that give the language away are highlighted in the sample, with a note on what its lookalikes use instead. Get it wrong and you see both languages’ notes side by side.
Languages whose written form is nearly identical — Croatian and Bosnian, Malay and Indonesian, Danish and Norwegian, Hindi and Nepali — are never used as wrong answers against each other, and either choice is accepted.
The decks overlap by design. A card's progress is stored against the language itself, so learning Swahili in the Africa deck also counts as learnt in Every language and in From flags you know — you never study the same thing twice over.
7 languages in the reference section have no verified sample yet — including sign languages, which have no written form. Those are shown in the wiki but left out of the quiz rather than guessed at.