Langle

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Name the world language from a sample text, in six tries.

Play Langle

on langle.uk

Today's Langle board, the board itself: a Vietnamese sample text at the top and a first guess, Thai, rated 95% close with a green bar, five empty rows below

Langle shows you a passage in an unknown language and asks which one it is. Each guess is rated by how close the guessed language is spoken to the answer, and you have six tries. There are three levels a day, from widely known languages to rare ones, and a gold star for getting all three.

About Langle

Langle is a daily language-guessing game in the spirit of Wordle. The sample text is always Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the most translated document in the world, and the game draws on more than 300 of its translations.

You type a language to guess. If you are wrong, your guess is rated by distance: the closer the guessed language is spoken to the answer, the higher the score. A language's location is roughly the centre of the area where it is spoken, or for colonial languages like English and Spanish, the centre of the country of origin. You have six tries, and the result shares as rows of coloured squares with your closeness.

Each day has three daily languages at three difficulty levels, so both casual language fans and enthusiasts have something to do; guess all three to earn a gold star. The game keeps your statistics, current and longest streak in a cookie, shows yesterday's solutions, and lets you share one level's result or all three at once. It suits players of Lingule and anyone who likes spotting scripts, accents and word shapes.

How to play Langle

Open langle.uk; the level is set in Settings, and Level 1 is the default.
Read the sample text at the top of the board.
Type a language in the Guess language box and press Submit; the box only takes languages on its list.
Read the closeness bar and percentage: the higher it is, the nearer your guess is spoken to the answer.
Name it within six tries, then switch level in Settings for the day's other two languages.

Screenshots

An earlier Langle board: a sample sentence in Arabic script at the top, six empty guess rows, a Guess language input box and a Submit button

Tips

Since the text is always the same article, learn how it opens in common languages: patterns repeat.
Script first: Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari or Latin rules out most of the world.
Look for distinctive letters and accents, such as ñ, ø, ğ or ß.