Which country does this belong to? Type a country to guess.
Rules & what counts
Language Detective — Rules & What Counts
Language Detective shows you a short, everyday sentence written in a mystery language — "¿Dónde está la biblioteca más cercana?", "はじめまして", "Undskyld, hvor er det nærmeste apotek?" — and asks you to name a country where that language is spoken. You get ten sentences per game, each in a different language drawn at random from a pool of the world's major tongues, so no two rounds feel alike.
Some languages give the game away with their script — Greek, Thai, Hebrew, Amharic and Japanese are unmistakable once you know the alphabet. Others are all about the little clues: a Portuguese sentence versus a Spanish one, Danish versus Norwegian, Russian versus Ukrainian. That's where a real language detective earns their badge.
How to play
Read the sentence in the middle of the screen, then type a country into the search box — the same country picker used across TRIVI.GG.
Pick a suggestion or press Enter to lock in a guess. Guess as many times as you like — a wrong country just drops out of the list so you can keep hunting.
A guess is correct if the language is official (or the de-facto national language) in the country you named.
Stuck on one? Hit Skip to reveal the answer and move on — a skipped language simply doesn't score.
When you get it right (or skip), the language is revealed with an English translation and every country that would have counted.
The clock counts up from your first guess — it's a personal-best stopwatch, not a time limit.
What counts in this quiz
Ten languages per play-through, each shown as one randomly chosen sample sentence.
Many languages have several correct countries — Spanish counts for twenty nations, French for over twenty-five, Arabic across the Arab world — and ANY one of them is accepted.
Widely spoken world languages with clear national homes: Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Swahili and many more.
What's not included — and why
No micronations — every accepted answer is a real, sizeable country you can actually type and find.
No made-up or constructed languages, and no regional dialects without a national home — only languages with a genuine official or national status somewhere.
Good to know
Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers of any language, but English is the most widely spoken once second-language speakers are counted.
Spanish is an official language on four continents; Arabic is official in more than twenty countries stretching from Morocco to Oman.
Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are so close that speakers of one can often read the other two — which is exactly what makes them the trickiest rounds here.