📌 Identifying a language

The Bulgarian is quite a tricky one, especially for the people who don't use the Cyrillic alphabet often. Useful link for anyone, who's not familiar with the letters - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_alphabet

1). We use only the Cyrillic alphabet, we don't have letters from the Latin alphabet, except the ones that are the same for both scripts, like A, O, E etc. (if there are J's - that's Macedonian, not Bulgarian)

2). We don't have letters, such as ы or э - that's Russian, not Bulgarian.

3). We use the letter ь ALWAYS in a combination with o as "ьо" (and it's not used really often), and never at the end/beginning of a word - so if you see it on it's own, that's maybe Russian again.

4) We don't have any diaereses (ë is Russian) or any types of accents (like à, á, â) - in a really, really rare cases there can be a stressed è or ò, but most of the people don't write it, it's only used when a word can be mistaken for one that has a different stress (example - ужàсен/ужа`сен and ужасèн/ужасе`н - the first one means terrible, and the second - terrified). It is used mainly in books and it's really really rare - the sentence has to be vague to need an extra accent. Plus, if it's for recognizing a song's language, most of the people who write lyrics online are not that good ar Bulgarian writing.
The only exception is actually ѝ on its own (dative case of the 3 person singular feminine personal pronoun, short form, something which may be translated as "of hers", but still it depends on the context), but nowadays people usually write it as й on its own (to be distinguished from the normal и, which means and).

5). We don't use any of these special characters - Њ, Ђ, Ў, Љ, Џ (most of them are Serbian, if I'm not mistaken), or the Ukrainian ones Ї / ї , Є / є , Ґ /ґ (credit goes to Alex here).

6). We actually use the letter ъ/Ъ. A lot. Way too many words have it, so if you don't have any of the already mentioned "special characters" and you see lots of ъ's, then most probably it's Bulgarian.

That's what I can think of now, if I remember something else that's specific, I'll mention it :)

They actually exist as letters in the Cyrillic alphabet, what I meant we don't have extra ones, except the ones that exist in both scripts :D (like the J example)

This is a very interesting topic that may be used as a means of help, so I marked it as 'sticky'. It won't disappear when more people comment here as time passes by ;)

Turkish, for example, has a very similar vocal harmony, too. The difference being that it additionally also has the letter ı (also a back vowel) and that e is not neutral but front (the distinction there is actually not back and front, but rounded lips and unrounded lips).
But Finnish can be easily recognized by its huge amount of vowels per word.

नमस्ते That's the language to you! Hindi! Up to more than 70 letters and characters altogether! A linguist's delight! 8)

Actually, when I see that I first assume it to be Sanskrit - at least regarding some of the lyrics of "unknown" language I found here as those mostly are of religious topics. (and the word your quoted would be Sanskrit, as well).

I'm not entirely sure with Spanish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography): we have "ñ/Ñ" or "ü/Ü" and that's about it, even the accents are similar to other romance languages (áéíóú).

1)The Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet is most easily differentiated from the other Cyrillic versions by its three unique letters: Ќќ, Ѓѓ, Ѕѕ. If you see these three letters, you can be definitely sure it's Macedonian. Every other letter is present in other Cyrillic alphabet( s ).

2) The usage of the grave accent in the words /сè/ and /нè/ is a unique characteristic of the Macedonian orthographic rules.

I believe, English is easy to identify by "I" looming here and there and proudly looking down on the other letters. :)

But we're talking about published texts, I guess. Besides, what do you want from an English teacher? ;)

You mean the people? :~

Alex: I mean the language (corrected ;))

English also has a vast array of words that look like they shouldn't be in the same language, though that might be a little more difficult to identify for most.

I mean, English is a language where both "beauty" and "wonder" can exist, and it's not weird.

English has the biggest vocabulary of all! About 1 million entries in dictionaries. Historically one and the same word might have been borrowed from different languages that's why we have beautiful-beauteous, regal-royal-king's-queen's etc. It has all mounted up to one million words over a period of time. Thank you, Steve, it's the first time I've heard about that language vote. I'll look it up. :)

हीरे मोती मैं ना चाहूँ Hindi is easily recognisable as one of the Indian languages because each word must be written under a line with spacing between the words. There are 55 letters in the Devanagari ABC plus some extra characters. The sentences are divided by a detached vertical line. There are no capital letters. The problem is that there are other Indian languages that use that writing-under-the-line principle like Bengali, Sanskrit and others. But at list it can help to narrow down the area of search to India.

I decided to add something about Albanian, since I've seen it mixed with so many other languages. I always classify it under the category "has nothing in common with anything else" though... a lot easier task than trying to recognize the Slavic languages, I guess.

1). It uses the Roman alphabet; some specific characters/combination of letters that make it recognizable - ë, ç (no any other accents of any type), dh, gj, xh, zh, nj, rr, ll.
It more often than other languages in my opinion uses single q's, y, x and j (that's a really popular one).

2) Albanian uses ë a lot. However, this is not a really good indicator over the internet, since some people omit it (or rarely write it as normal e, because the normal e often changes the meaning of the words, like it changes some nouns from singular to plural, for example), so if you see many hard to pronounce consonants next to each other, it may be Albanian with omitted ë's (especially if you spot some of the letters I mentioned above too).

edit: and the Albanian doesn't use the letter W at all.

I try to introduce my native language, so the hungarian ;)

1) About the alphabet:

- Hungarian uses the Roman alphabet in addition to some diacritics placed over some vowels. The accent mark( s ) above the vowels indicate that the vowel is 'long'. Some consonants are digraphs, they consist of two letters; one consonant (dzs) is a trigraph. Although they are written with more than one letter, digraphs (and the trigraph) are each individual letters of the alphabet. (All consonants are pronounced – there are no silent letters.)

a á b c cs d dz dzs e é f g gy h i í j k l ly m n ny o ó ö ő p q r s sz t ty u ú ü ű v w x y z zs

- If you see long words, for example: 'megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért' (this is the longest hungarian word) its surely hungarian language ;)

2) Few extra informations about the hungarian pronunciation:

- All consonants can be long or short. Long consonants are written as double consonants and are pronounced approximately twice as long as
short ones.

- Hungarian vowels are classified according to front vs. back assonance and rounded vs. unrounded. These terms come from describing the tongue position in the mouth and the roundedness of the lips, respectively. The following is the vowel inventory of Hungarian:

Back vowels: a, á, o, ó, u, ú
Front unrounded vowels: e, é, i, í
Front rounded vowels: ö, ő, ü, ű

Vowel harmony rules in Hungarian require that front or back assonance in the vowels of a stem be maintained throughout the entire word, thus for the most part – except for recent loan words – Hungarian words have either only back vowels in them or only front vowels.

Here's a nice overview on recognizing languages by their special characters:
http://theweek.com/articles/617776/how-identify-language-glance
http://theweek.com/articles/620397/how-identify-asian-african-middle-eas...

It's very easy to distinguish Polish. If you see letters: ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ś, ż, ź, or ó. you can be sure it's Polish. Only the last letter may be confused with accent, like you have it in Spanish, but it completely changes the pronunciation, cos it's a different letter.

Nevertheless, If you see some of these letters in one text then for sure it won't be Sanskrit, nor Hindi nor any other language.

And as for ß in German it seems to be a dying letter. When I read the first book that was written according to "new rules" (they are not new anymore, but how should I call them?) and I saw dass instead of daß I nearly fainted. After many years I still cannot accept it.

It's fairly easy to distinguish the Irish and Scottish gaelic languages.

In Irish, gc, bp, or dt at the beginning of a word are quite common.
In Scottish, none of gc, bp, and dt can occur at the beginning of a word.

In Irish letters á,é,í,ó and ú are all common but à, è, ì, ò and ù never occur. Verbal nouns ending in ú are quite common, while words ending adh are quite rare.
In Scotttish letters à, è, ì, ò and ù are all common. ú and í never occur. In traditional spelling, á occurs only in the proposition á/ás, but é and ó are common. Verbal nouns mostly end in "adh". In the new GOC (designed and defined by a committee far less competent that the one that famosuly tried to design a horse and ended up with a camel - this one would have achieved a legless camel with 27 humps) á ,é and ó are required to be written à (long stressed a), è (long open e) and ò (long open o) evenwhere there are pairs of words with different pronunciations and different meanings that must according to this silly rule be spellt identically.

If there are no accented vowels at all in a long text, either it's email or it isn't modern Irish. It could be modern Scottish, because over the last hundred years or so several individuals have chosen to publish books without accent marks on vowels (that strikes me as silly; but one of my favorite books - Cameron's collection of poems/songs written by Tiristich, "Na Baird Thirisdeach" - does that, Cameron claiming they aren't needed because people who speak the language know how to pronounce it even if it's written without accent marks - presumably he also thought they could resolve any resulting ambiguities). But from the mid 80s until the late 90s email generally couldn't cope with anything but 7-bit ascii, so either we didn't use accents in either language, or we used something like "\" before the vowel to indicate a grave accent and "/" after the vowel to indicate an acute accent, so maybe there are quite a few accent-free texts sculling around.

The Dutch language is hard to tell apart from the German language if you are unable to speak any of these languages.

Just as what was said before about the German language, the Dutch language doesn't have the ß.
We do have a lot of words in common with other countries.
Words as Café, überhaupt, troittoir and games are all correct in our language.
One way to find out easily if it's Dutch or not is to see if it has the word "Maar" in it. We use it a lot, (maybe a little too much!)
It is also possible to check because we have some weird vowel combinations such as "eu, au, ou, ei, ij, oe & ui"

I hope this will help a little (:

I understand this is not Arabic or Persian forum, so I hope it's not off-topic.

Arabic script is used in Arabic language along with Persian, Urdu and many other languages.

Letters گ چ پ ژ are never used in Arabic.
So if they exist in text, it's most likely Persian or Urdu.
But also can be Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Punjabi, Balochi or Kashmiri.

Letters ٹ ڈ ڑ ے are used in Urdu, Punjabi, Balochi, Kashmiri.
But never used in Persian.

The letter ي has different forms with different Unicode letters and slightly different shapes depending on the position.
In Arabic: ي
In Persian: ی but in old versions of Windows (before 7) people typed the Arabic letter ي
In Urdu: ے

Also Arabic letter ك‎ has equivalent Persian letter ک (that was typed as Arabic form in Windows older than 7)

Letter ں seems to be only used in Urdu.

Kurdish is a family of different languages, all of them either in Latin script or Arabic script.
In case of Arabic script, it can contain these letters: ڕ ڤ‎ ێ ۆ ڵ‎ that seem to be specific to Kurdish.

Punjabi can be written in either Gurmukhi or Arabic script. (Gurmukhi is Left-to-Right, unlike Arabic)
In case of Arabic, it's called Shahmukhi alphabet, and it seems to be very similar to Urdu alphabet and I'm not sure how to distinguish them!

Pashto alphabet contain some unique letter like: ټ څ ڊ ډ ګ ڼ

Uyghur alphabet contains ڭ‎ ې ۈ ۇ that seem to be specific to Uyghur, and ۆ which is common with Kurdish.
It also uses the Arabic form of ك‎ (different than ڭ).