Detectable languages 

When you analyze text or a web page, Natural Language Understanding detects the source language automatically and returns the corresponding ISO 639-1 code in the response. For automatic language detection to work best, it is recommended that you use text with at least 100 characters.

If automatic language detection isn't working well for your use case, you can [manually specify the language of your content](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/natural-language-understanding?topic=natural-language-understanding-overriding-language-detection) in each request.

The following table lists the detectable languages and corresponding ISO 639-1 codes.



 Language        ISO 639-1 code  

 Afrikaans       af              
 Albanian        sq              
 Amharic         am              
 Arabic          ar              
 Armenian        hy              
 Azerbaijani     az              
 Basque          eu              
 Belarusian      be              
 Bengali         bn              
 Bihari          bh              
 Bulgarian       bg              
 Catalan         ca              
 Chinese         zh              
 Croatian        hr              
 Czech           cs              
 Danish          da              
 Dhivehi         dv              
 Dutch           nl              
 English         en              
 Estonian        et              
 Fijian          fj              
 Finnish         fi              
 French          fr              
 Galician        gl              
 Ganda           lg              
 Georgian        ka              
 German          de              
 Greek           el              
 Gujarati        gu              
 Haitian Creole  ht              
 Hebrew          he              
 Hindi           hi              
 Hungarian       hu              
 Icelandic       is              
 Indonesian      id              
 Inuktitut       iu              
 Irish           ga              
 Italian         it              
 Javanese        jv              
 Japanese        ja              
 Kannada         kn              
 Khmer           km              
 Kinyarwanda     rw              
 Kirghiz         ky              
 Korean          ko              
 Latin           la              
 Laothian        lo              
 Latvian         lv              
 Lithuanian      lt              
 Macedonian      mk              
 Malay           ms              
 Malayalam       ml              
 Maltese         mt              
 Maori           mi              
 Marathi         mr              
 Nepali          ne              
 Norwegian       no              
 Oriya           or              
 Persian         fa              
 Polish          pl              
 Portuguese      pt              
 Punjabi         pa              
 Pashto          ps              
 Romanian        ro              
 Russian         ru              
 Scots Gaelic    gd              
 Serbian         sr              
 Shona           sn              
 Sinhalese       si              
 Slovak          sk              
 Slovenian       sl              
 Spanish         es              
 Swahili         sw              
 Swedish         sv              
 Tagalog         tl              
 Tamil           ta              
 Telugu          te              
 Thai            th              
 Turkish         tr              
 Ukrainian       uk              
 Urdu            ur              
 Vietnamese      vi              
 Welsh           cy              
 Wolof           wo              
 Xhosa           xh              
 Yiddish         Yi