IBM Cloud Docs
Identifiable languages

Identifiable languages

IBM is announcing the deprecation of the IBM Watson® Language Translator service for IBM Cloud® in all regions. As of 10 June 2023, the Language Translator tile will be removed from the IBM Cloud Platform for new customers; only existing customers will be able to access the product. As of 10 June 2024, the service will reach its End of Support date. As of 10 December 2024, the service will be withdrawn entirely and will no longer be available to any customers.

IBM Watson® Language Translator can identify a variety of languages.

Listing identifiable languages

You can use the List identifiable languages method to retrieve the list of identifiable languages. The following example calls the method:

curl -X GET --user "apikey:{apikey}" \
"{url}/v3/identifiable_languages?version=2018-05-01"

The method returns a complete list of all identifiable languages, sorted by language code (for example, af, ar). The output includes the name of the language.

{
  "languages": [
    {
      "language": "af",
      "name": "Afrikaans"
    },
    {
      "language": "ar",
      "name": "Arabic"
    },
    {
      "language": "az",
      "name": "Azerbaijani"
    },
    {
      "language": "ba",
      "name": "Bashkir"
    }
    . . .
  ]
}

List of identifiable languages

The following table list the identifiable languages. The table is sorted by language name and provides the language code for each language.

The service uses ISO two-character codes for most languages. It uses an ISO three-character code (cnr) for Montenegrin. In some cases, it uses a two-character language code and a two-character country code separated by a hyphen, such as pa-PK for Punjabi spoken in Pakistan and zh-TW for traditional (Mandarin) Chinese spoken in Taiwan.

Table 1. Identifiable languages
Language name Language code Language name Language code
Afrikaans af Kirghiz ky
Albanian sq Korean ko
Arabic ar Kurdish ku
Armenian hy Lao lo
Azerbaijani az Latvian lv
Bashkir ba Lithuanian lt
Basque eu Malay ms
Belarusian be Malayalam ml
Bengali bn Maltese mt
Bulgarian bg Marathi mr
Burmese my Mongolian mn
Catalan ca Nepali ne
Central Khmer km Norwegian Bokmål nb
Chinese (Simplified) zh Norwegian Nynorsk nn
Chinese (Traditional) zh-TW Persian fa
Chuvash cv Polish pl
Croatian hr Portuguese pt
Czech cs Punjabi (Indian) pa
Danish da Punjabi (Pakistani)
(Shahmukhi script)
pa-PK
Dutch nl Pushto ps
English en Romanian ro
Esperanto eo Russian ru
Estonian et Serbian sr
Finnish fi Sinhala si
French fr Slovakian sk
Georgian ka Slovenian sl
German de Somali so
Greek el Spanish es
Gujarati gu Swedish sv
Haitian ht Tagalog tl
Hebrew he Tamil ta
Hindi hi Telugu te
Hungarian hu Thai th
Icelandic is Turkish tr
Irish ga Ukrainian uk
Italian it Urdu ur
Japanese ja Vietnamese vi
Kazakh kk Welsh cy