Languages

Guess the Language shows the same short text every time: people are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Only the language changes. You have six guesses, and each one comes back with four clues: whether your guess shares the answer's family and branch, whether it uses the same script, and how far apart the two languages are on the map, with an arrow pointing the way.

The families and branches come from Glottolog, the catalogue of languages kept by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and the texts from the UDHR in Unicode project. There is one puzzle a day for everyone, drawn from 74 widely known languages, with Sundays taken from the 54 harder ones. Practice rounds draw from either list or both.

The map can send you the wrong way. Hungarian is spoken next door to Slovak and is unrelated to it, while its relatives are in Estonia and Finland. Malagasy is spoken off Africa and belongs to the family of Malay and Maori. Maltese is a Semitic language written in Latin letters, and Yiddish a Germanic one written in Hebrew letters.