What language is this?

General-purpose language detectors handle Tagalog and Cebuano and treat the rest of the Philippines as a rounding error. If you have a message and cannot tell whether it is Hiligaynon or Waray, they are no help — and those two are exactly the pair people most often cannot separate.

This one covers eight Philippine languages plus English, and it shows its working. Knowing that maupay appears only in Waray is more useful than being handed a percentage, because it is the thing you can carry to the next sentence.

It compares your words against a parallel phrase set of 287 everyday concepts held across all nine languages — 1,643 distinct word forms in total. A word counts for more when fewer languages use it.

• Maupay appears in Waray and nowhere else on this list. It is close to decisive on its own.
• Maayo appears in Cebuano and Hiligaynon. It narrows things to two and cannot settle between them.
• Salamat appears in eight of the nine. It is worth almost nothing, and the tool says so rather than pretending otherwise.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you paste is sent anywhere — there is no request to send it in.

The limit is simple and worth stating plainly: it only knows words that appear in our phrase set. That set covers everyday vocabulary well and everything else not at all.

• Proper nouns, place names, brand names and technical terms are invisible to it.
• A few words is thin evidence. It will say so rather than guess confidently — a detector that always answers is one that is often wrong silently.
• Closely related languages sharing the vocabulary in your text will come back as a tie. That is a fact about the languages, not a failure to decide.
• Kapampangan and Pangasinan have the thinnest coverage in the underlying data, so they are recognised less reliably than the rest.

The phrase set behind it is published in full under CC BY-SA 4.0, so you can check exactly what it does and does not know.

Every language here has a translator, a phrasebook and a guide to how it differs from Tagalog: Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Waray, Ilocano, Bikol, Kapampangan, Pangasinan.

If the answer came back as Cebuano or Hiligaynon and you are not sure the distinction matters, it does.