The things that can be used to distinguish one language from another. The order in which the above occur can also be characteristic of a language. Word endings Statistical Matters As we are told nothing about the data files, we may have to make some guesses. It should be stressed that the question is not looking for details of a specific algorithm, and it is possible for students to waste a lot of time on this. As we did not expect students to know many different languages, we expected to find fairly general comments.
Words can be a good indicator.
But on their own, they have problems. Even fairly common words might not be found in some files. That said, short words in general are quite a good measure. Long words are less likely to re-occur and will take too much storage space. Letters are good, as even relatively small files will contain large numbers of them.