Which country does this belong to? Type a country to guess.
Rules & what counts
Language Detective: Europe — Rules & What Counts
The European edition of Language Detective: every sentence comes from a language of Europe, and your job is the same — read it, work out what it is, and name a country where people speak it. Europe is where the format bites hardest, because the continent is packed with near-twins: Danish against Norwegian, Czech against its neighbours, and a whole cluster of Cyrillic alphabets that only differ by a letter or two.
Ten languages per game, drawn from a pool of twenty — from the big five you'd expect down to Icelandic, Serbian and Bulgarian.
How to play
Read the sentence in the middle of the screen, then type a country into the search box.
Pick a suggestion or press Enter to lock in a guess. Guess as many times as you like — a wrong country drops out of the list.
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 does not score.
When you get it right (or skip), the game reveals the language, an English translation and every country that would have counted.
The clock counts up from your first guess — it is a stopwatch, not a time limit.
What counts in this quiz
Twenty European languages, from Portuguese and German to Icelandic, Serbian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian. Each game draws ten.
Many languages accept several countries — German counts for six, French for many more — and ANY one of them is accepted.
What's not included — and why
No languages from outside Europe — Turkish, Georgian and Arabic play in the Asia and Africa editions instead.
No made-up or constructed languages, and no dialects without a national home.
Good to know
Iceland's þ (thorn) survives in no other living Nordic language — spot it and the round is over.
The letter ј inside Cyrillic text is a Serbian signature: Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian never use it.
Bulgarian hides its definite article at the END of the noun — one of the tells that separates it from Russian.