Detect Text Language API

Identify the most likely language in a text sample and receive ranked candidates with standard two-letter codes and confidence scores.

Try the live demo or view API details.

Common uses

Route support messages to the right language queue.
Select localized content or translation workflows.
Organize multilingual documents before indexing.
Add language signals to moderation and analytics pipelines.

Request

Send appkey as a query parameter and content in a JSON body. Text must contain meaningful characters and may contain up to 100,000 Unicode characters or 512 KiB of UTF-8 data.

curl -X POST "https://api.gugudata.io/v1/text/detectlanguage?appkey=YOUR_APPKEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"content":"Bonjour, ceci est un exemple stable pour identifier la langue française."}'

Response

Candidates are ordered by descending probability. LanguageAbbr uses a lowercase two-letter language code; Simplified and Traditional Chinese results are represented as zh.

{
  "dataStatus": {
    "requestParameter": "content_chars=72,content_bytes=73",
    "statusCode": 200,
    "status": "SUCCESS",
    "statusDescription": "successfully",
    "responseDateTime": "2026-09-05 05:30:00+0000",
    "dataTotalCount": 1
  },
  "data": [
    {
      "Language": "French",
      "LanguageAbbr": "fr",
      "Probability": 0.999996
    }
  ]
}

Field	Type	Description
`data[].Language`	`string`	English language name.
`data[].LanguageAbbr`	`string`	Lowercase two-letter language code.
`data[].Probability`	`number`	Relative confidence from 0 to 1.

Detection guidance

Longer natural-language samples generally produce stronger results. Short phrases, names, mixed-language text, URLs, and shared vocabulary can reduce confidence. The API returns ranked candidates without imposing a subjective confidence threshold.

Pure numbers, symbols, or URLs do not provide enough language evidence and return 422.

HTTP status codes

Status	Meaning
`200`	Language candidates returned.
`400`	Missing, empty, malformed, or oversized input.
`401`	Missing or invalid application key.
`403`	The application key cannot access this API.
`422`	Valid text format without detectable language evidence.
`429`	Request or usage limit exceeded.
`500`	Unexpected processing error.
`502`	The detector returned an invalid result.
`503`	Language detection is temporarily unavailable.

Do not automatically retry 400, 401, 403, or 422. For temporary 502 or 503 responses, use bounded backoff.

Explore more developer APIs at GuGuData.