---
title: Language identification
description: Language identification enables you to determine the language of text. A language identification model is provided in your cluster, which you can use...
url: https://www.elastic.co/docs/explore-analyze/machine-learning/nlp/ml-nlp-lang-ident
products:
  - Elasticsearch
  - Machine Learning
applies_to:
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless: Generally available
  - Elastic Stack: Generally available
---

# Language identification
Language identification enables you to determine the language of text.
A language identification model is provided in your cluster, which you can use in an inference processor of an ingest pipeline by using its model ID (`lang_ident_model_1`). For an example, refer to [*Add NLP inference to ingest pipelines*](https://www.elastic.co/docs/explore-analyze/machine-learning/nlp/ml-nlp-inference).
The longer the text passed into the language identification model, the more accurately the model can identify the language. It is fairly accurate on short samples (for example, 50 character-long streams) in certain languages, but languages that are similar to each other are harder to identify based on a short character stream. If there is no valid text from which the identity can be inferred, the model returns the special language code `zxx`. If you prefer to use a different default value, you can adjust your ingest pipeline to replace `zxx` predictions with your preferred value.
Language identification takes into account Unicode boundaries when the feature set is built. If the text has diacritical marks, then the model uses that information for identifying the language of the text. In certain cases, the model can detect the source language even if it is not written in the script that the language traditionally uses. These languages are marked in the supported languages table (see below) with the `Latn` subtag. Language identification supports Unicode input.

## Supported languages

The table below contains the ISO codes and the English names of the languages that language identification supports. If a language has a 2-letter `ISO 639-1` code, the table contains that identifier. Otherwise, the 3-letter `ISO 639-2` code is used. The `Latn` subtag indicates that the language is transliterated into Latin script.

| Code    | Language           | Code    | Language       | Code    | Language       |
|---------|--------------------|---------|----------------|---------|----------------|
| af      | Afrikaans          | hr      | Croatian       | pa      | Punjabi        |
| am      | Amharic            | ht      | Haitian        | pl      | Polish         |
| ar      | Arabic             | hu      | Hungarian      | ps      | Pashto         |
| az      | Azerbaijani        | hy      | Armenian       | pt      | Portuguese     |
| be      | Belarusian         | id      | Indonesian     | ro      | Romanian       |
| bg      | Bulgarian          | ig      | Igbo           | ru      | Russian        |
| bg-Latn | Bulgarian          | is      | Icelandic      | ru-Latn | Russian        |
| bn      | Bengali            | it      | Italian        | sd      | Sindhi         |
| bs      | Bosnian            | iw      | Hebrew         | si      | Sinhala        |
| ca      | Catalan            | ja      | Japanese       | sk      | Slovak         |
| ceb     | Cebuano            | ja-Latn | Japanese       | sl      | Slovenian      |
| co      | Corsican           | jv      | Javanese       | sm      | Samoan         |
| cs      | Czech              | ka      | Georgian       | sn      | Shona          |
| cy      | Welsh              | kk      | Kazakh         | so      | Somali         |
| da      | Danish             | km      | Central Khmer  | sq      | Albanian       |
| de      | German             | kn      | Kannada        | sr      | Serbian        |
| el      | Greek, modern      | ko      | Korean         | st      | Southern Sotho |
| el-Latn | Greek, modern      | ku      | Kurdish        | su      | Sundanese      |
| en      | English            | ky      | Kirghiz        | sv      | Swedish        |
| eo      | Esperanto          | la      | Latin          | sw      | Swahili        |
| es      | Spanish, Castilian | lb      | Luxembourgish  | ta      | Tamil          |
| et      | Estonian           | lo      | Lao            | te      | Telugu         |
| eu      | Basque             | lt      | Lithuanian     | tg      | Tajik          |
| fa      | Persian            | lv      | Latvian        | th      | Thai           |
| fi      | Finnish            | mg      | Malagasy       | tr      | Turkish        |
| fil     | Filipino           | mi      | Maori          | uk      | Ukrainian      |
| fr      | French             | mk      | Macedonian     | ur      | Urdu           |
| fy      | Western Frisian    | ml      | Malayalam      | uz      | Uzbek          |
| ga      | Irish              | mn      | Mongolian      | vi      | Vietnamese     |
| gd      | Gaelic             | mr      | Marathi        | xh      | Xhosa          |
| gl      | Galician           | ms      | Malay          | yi      | Yiddish        |
| gu      | Gujarati           | mt      | Maltese        | yo      | Yoruba         |
| ha      | Hausa              | my      | Burmese        | zh      | Chinese        |
| haw     | Hawaiian           | ne      | Nepali         | zh-Latn | Chinese        |
| hi      | Hindi              | nl      | Dutch, Flemish | zu      | Zulu           |
| hi-Latn | Hindi              | no      | Norwegian      |         |                |
| hmn     | Hmong              | ny      | Chichewa       |         |                |


## Example of language identification

In the following example, we feed the language identification trained model a short Hungarian text that contains diacritics and a couple of English words. The model identifies the text correctly as Hungarian with high probability.
```js
POST _ingest/pipeline/_simulate
{
   "pipeline":{
      "processors":[
         {
            "inference":{
               "model_id":"lang_ident_model_1", 
               "inference_config":{
                  "classification":{
                     "num_top_classes":5 
                  }
               },
               "field_map":{
               }
            }
         }
      ]
   },
   "docs":[
      {
         "_source":{ 
            "text":"Sziasztok! Ez egy rövid magyar szöveg. Nézzük, vajon sikerül-e azonosítania a language identification funkciónak? Annak ellenére is sikerülni fog, hogy a szöveg két angol szót is tartalmaz."
         }
      }
   ]
}
```

In the example above, the `num_top_classes` value indicates that only the top five languages (that is to say, the ones with the highest probability) are reported.
The request returns the following response:
```js
{
  "docs" : [
    {
      "doc" : {
        "_index" : "_index",
        "_type" : "_doc",
        "_id" : "_id",
        "_source" : {
          "text" : "Sziasztok! Ez egy rövid magyar szöveg. Nézzük, vajon sikerül-e azonosítania a language identification funkciónak? Annak ellenére is sikerülni fog, hogy a szöveg két angol szót is tartalmaz.",
          "ml" : {
            "inference" : {
              "top_classes" : [ 
                {
                  "class_name" : "hu",
                  "class_probability" : 0.9999936063740517,
                  "class_score" : 0.9999936063740517
                },
                {
                  "class_name" : "lv",
                  "class_probability" : 2.5020248433413966E-6,
                  "class_score" : 2.5020248433413966E-6
                },
                {
                  "class_name" : "is",
                  "class_probability" : 1.0150420723037688E-6,
                  "class_score" : 1.0150420723037688E-6
                },
                {
                  "class_name" : "ga",
                  "class_probability" : 6.67935962773335E-7,
                  "class_score" : 6.67935962773335E-7
                },
                {
                  "class_name" : "tr",
                  "class_probability" : 5.591166324774555E-7,
                  "class_score" : 5.591166324774555E-7
                }
              ],
              "predicted_value" : "hu", 
              "model_id" : "lang_ident_model_1"
            }
          }
        },
        "_ingest" : {
          "timestamp" : "2020-01-22T14:25:14.644912Z"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}
```


## Further reading

- [Multilingual search using language identification in Elasticsearch](https://www.elastic.co/blog/multilingual-search-using-language-identification-in-elasticsearch)