---
name: natural-language-understanding-detectable-languages
title: Detectable languages
description: When you analyze text or a web page, Natural Language Understanding detects the source language automatically and returns the corresponding ISO 639-1 code in the response. For automatic language detection to work best, it is recommended that you use text with at least 100 characters.
last-updated: 2020-02-24
---

> ## Documentation Index
> The table of contents for this documentation set is at https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/natural-language-understanding?format=markdown
> The index for all IBM Cloud docs is at: https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/llms.txt
> Use these files to discover more information as needed.

{:shortdesc: .shortdesc}
{:new_window: target="_blank"}
{:tip: .tip}
{:pre: .pre}
{:codeblock: .codeblock}
{:screen: .screen}
{:javascript: .ph data-hd-programlang='javascript'}
{:java: .ph data-hd-programlang='java'}
{:python: .ph data-hd-programlang='python'}
{:swift: .ph data-hd-programlang='swift'}

# Detectable languages
{: #detectable-languages}

When you analyze text or a web page, Natural Language Understanding detects the source language automatically and returns the corresponding ISO 639-1 code in the response. For automatic language detection to work best, it is recommended that you use text with at least 100 characters.
{: shortdesc}

If automatic language detection isn't working well for your use case, you can [manually specify the language of your content](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/natural-language-understanding?topic=natural-language-understanding-overriding-language-detection&format=markdown) in each request.
{: tip}

The following table lists the detectable languages and corresponding ISO 639-1 codes.

|Language    |ISO 639-1 code|
|------------|------|
|Afrikaans|af|
|Albanian|sq|
|Amharic|am|
|Arabic|ar|
|Armenian|hy|
|Azerbaijani|az|
|Basque|eu|
|Belarusian|be|
|Bengali|bn|
|Bihari|bh|
|Bulgarian|bg|
|Catalan|ca|
|Chinese|zh|
|Croatian|hr|
|Czech|cs|
|Danish|da|
|Dhivehi|dv|
|Dutch|nl|
|English|en|
|Estonian|et|
|Fijian|fj|
|Finnish|fi|
|French|fr|
|Galician|gl|
|Ganda|lg|
|Georgian|ka|
|German|de|
|Greek|el|
|Gujarati|gu|
|Haitian Creole|ht|
|Hebrew|he|
|Hindi|hi|
|Hungarian|hu|
|Icelandic|is|
|Indonesian|id|
|Inuktitut|iu|
|Irish|ga|
|Italian|it|
|Javanese|jv|
|Japanese|ja|
|Kannada|kn|
|Khmer|km|
|Kinyarwanda|rw|
|Kirghiz|ky|
|Korean|ko|
|Latin|la|
|Laothian|lo|
|Latvian|lv|
|Lithuanian|lt|
|Macedonian|mk|
|Malay|ms|
|Malayalam|ml|
|Maltese|mt|
|Maori|mi|
|Marathi|mr|
|Nepali|ne|
|Norwegian|no|
|Oriya|or|
|Persian|fa|
|Polish|pl|
|Portuguese|pt|
|Punjabi|pa|
|Pashto|ps|
|Romanian|ro|
|Russian|ru|
|Scots Gaelic|gd|
|Serbian|sr|
|Shona|sn|
|Sinhalese|si|
|Slovak|sk|
|Slovenian|sl|
|Spanish|es|
|Swahili|sw|
|Swedish|sv|
|Tagalog|tl|
|Tamil|ta|
|Telugu|te|
|Thai|th|
|Turkish|tr|
|Ukrainian|uk|
|Urdu|ur|
|Vietnamese|vi|
|Welsh|cy|
|Wolof|wo|
|Xhosa|xh|
|Yiddish|Yi|