Dominant language
You can use Amazon Comprehend to examine text to determine the dominant language. Amazon Comprehend identifies the language using identifiers from RFC 5646 — if there is a 2-letter ISO 639-1 identifier, with a regional subtag if necessary, it uses that. Otherwise, it uses the ISO 639-2 3-letter code.
For more information about RFC 5646, see Tags for identifying languages
The response includes a score that indicates the confidence level that Amazon Comprehend has that a particular language is the dominant language in the document. Each score is independent of the other scores. The score doesn't indicate that a language makes up a particular percentage of a document.
If a long document (such as a book) contains multiple languages, you can break the long document into smaller
pieces and run the DetectDominantLanguage operation on the individual pieces. You can then aggregate
the results to determine the percentage of each language in the longer document.
Amazon Comprehend language detection has the following limitations:
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It doesn't support phonetic language detection. For example, it doesn't detect "arigato" as Japanese or "nihao" as Chinese.
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It may have diffuculty distinguishing close language pairs, such as Indonesian and Malay; or Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian.
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For best results, provide at least 20 characters of input text.
Amazon Comprehend detects the following languages.
| Code | Language |
|---|---|
| af | Afrikaans |
| am | Amharic |
| ar | Arabic |
| as | Assamese |
| az | Azerbaijani |
| ba | Bashkir |
| be | Belarusian |
| bn | Bengali |
| bs | Bosnian |
| bg | Bulgarian |
| ca | Catalan |
| ceb | Cebuano |
| cs | Czech |
| cv | Chuvash |
| cy | Welsh |
| da | Danish |
| de | German |
| el | Greek |
| en | English |
| eo | Esperanto |
| et | Estonian |
| eu | Basque |
| fa | Persian |
| fi | Finnish |
| fr | French |
| gd | Scottish Gaelic |
| ga | Irish |
| gl | Galician |
| gu | Gujarati |
| ht | Haitian |
| he | Hebrew |
| ha | Hausa |
| hi | Hindi |
| hr | Croatian |
| hu | Hungarian |
| hy | Armenian |
| ilo | Iloko |
| id | Indonesian |
| is | Icelandic |
| it | Italian |
| jv | Javanese |
| ja | Japanese |
| kn | Kannada |
| ka | Georgian |
| kk | Kazakh |
| km | Central Khmer |
| ky | Kirghiz |
| ko | Korean |
| ku | Kurdish |
| lo | Lao |
| la | Latin |
| lv | Latvian |
| lt | Lithuanian |
| lb | Luxembourgish |
| ml | Malayalam |
| mt | Maltese |
| mr | Marathi |
| mk | Macedonian |
| mg | Malagasy |
| mn | Mongolian |
| ms | Malay |
| my | Burmese |
| ne | Nepali |
| new | Newari |
| nl | Dutch |
| no | Norwegian |
| or | Oriya |
| om | Oromo |
| pa | Punjabi |
| pl | Polish |
| pt | Portuguese |
| ps | Pushto |
| qu | Quechua |
| ro | Romanian |
| ru | Russian |
| sa | Sanskrit |
| si | Sinhala |
| sk | Slovak |
| sl | Slovenian |
| sd | Sindhi |
| so | Somali |
| es | Spanish |
| sq | Albanian |
| sr | Serbian |
| su | Sundanese |
| sw | Swahili |
| sv | Swedish |
| ta | Tamil |
| tt | Tatar |
| te | Telugu |
| tg | Tajik |
| tl | Tagalog |
| th | Thai |
| tk | Turkmen |
| tr | Turkish |
| ug | Uighur |
| uk | Ukrainian |
| ur | Urdu |
| uz | Uzbek |
| vi | Vietnamese |
| yi | Yiddish |
| yo | Yoruba |
| zh | Chinese (Simplified) |
| zh-TW | Chinese (Traditional) |
You can use any of the following operations to detect the dominant language in a document or set of documents.
The DetectDominantLanguage operation returns a DominantLanguage object. The
BatchDetectDominantLanguage operation returns a list of
DominantLanguage objects, one for each document in the batch. The
StartDominantLanguageDetectionJob operation starts an asynchronous job
that produces a file containing a list of DominantLanguage objects, one for
each document in the job.
The following example is the response from the DetectDominantLanguage
operation.
{
"Languages": [
{
"LanguageCode": "en",
"Score": 0.9793661236763
}
]
}