Tool to detect language of text?

Question

Is there a tool that can detect the language of the text of several paragraphs?

Answer 1

The file tool has a bunch of heuristics for guessing file types, including one that reports "English text". I don't know if it knows about other human languages, but it definitely could be upgraded to guess between them.

Answer 2

there are many tools around to do this, the first one thatI can think of is Google's own: http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/#language_detect

• In java, there is http://textcat.sourceforge.net/
• In Ruby https://github.com/peterc/whatlanguage
• In Perl http://search.cpan.org/~ambs/Lingua-Identify-0.29/lib/Lingua/Identify.pm etc.

Hope it helps