Wizard LangID

WizardLangID is a Python library for Language identification via character n-gram profiles. Candidate gating guided by priors and linguistic cues, then probability estimation for each language. Supports 161 languages. Returns a top-1 ISO code or a probability-ordered list.

Installation

Requires Python 3.9+.

pip install wizardlangid

Quick start

Language Detection

Parameters

• text: Input string (Unicode).

• top_k: How many candidates to return (default 3).

• profiles_dir: Optional path overriding the bundled language profiles.

• use_mmap: If True, memory-map the profile tries (lower RAM; slightly slower first access).

• return_top1: If True, return only the best language code; otherwise a list of (lang, prob).

Return value

• str when return_top1=True (e.g., "it").

• list[tuple[str, float]] when return_top1=False (sorted by probability).

Examples

Top-1 (single code)

import wizardlangid as wl

text = "Ciao, come stai oggi?"
lang = wl.lang_detect(text, return_top1=True)
print(lang)

Output

it

Top-k distribution

import wizardlangid as wl

text = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
langs = wl.lang_detect(text, top_k=5, return_top1=False)
print(langs)

Output

[('en', 0.9999376335362183), ('mg', 4.719212057614953e-05), ('fy', 1.4727973350205069e-05), ('rm', 2.8718519851832537e-07), ('la', 1.5918465665694727e-07)]

Batch examples

import wizardlangid as wl

for s in [
    "これは日本語のテスト文です。",
    "Alex parle un peu français, aber nicht so viel.",
    "¿Dónde está la estación de tren?",
]:
    print("TOP1:", wl.lang_detect(s, return_top1=True))

Output

TOP1: ja
TOP1: fr
TOP1: es

Profiles directory & mmap

from pathlib import Path
import wizardlangid as wl

langs = wl.lang_detect(
    "Buongiorno a tutti!",
    profiles_dir=Path("/opt/WizardLangID/profiles"),  # custom profiles
    use_mmap=True,                                   # lower RAM
    top_k=3,
)
print(langs)

Operational notes

• Lazy loading: the model loads on first call and is cached for reuse.

• Short/ASCII texts: ambiguity is common; provide longer samples for better confidence.

• Profiles: if you keep profiles outside the package, pass profiles_dir.

• Probabilities are softmax-normalised over candidates returned by the gate.

Supported languages (161)

aa — Afar	ab — Abkhazian	af — Afrikaans
am — Amharic	an — Aragonese	ar — Arabic
as — Assamese	av — Avaric	ay — Aymara
az — Azerbaijani	ba — Bashkir	be — Belarusian
bg — Bulgarian	bm — Bambara	bn — Bengali
bo — Tibetan	br — Breton	bs — Bosnian
ca — Catalan	ce — Chechen	ch — Chamorro
cs — Czech	cv — Chuvash	cy — Welsh
da — Danish	de — German	dz — Dzongkha
ee — Ewe	el — Greek	en — English
eo — Esperanto	es — Spanish	et — Estonian
eu — Basque	fa — Persian	ff — Fula
fi — Finnish	fj — Fijian	fo — Faroese
fr — French	fy — Western Frisian	ga — Irish
gd — Scottish Gaelic	gl — Galician	gn — Guarani
gu — Gujarati	gv — Manx	ha — Hausa
he — Hebrew	hi — Hindi	hr — Croatian
ht — Haitian Creole	hu — Hungarian	hy — Armenian
id — Indonesian	ig — Igbo	io — Ido
is — Icelandic	it — Italian	iu — Inuktitut
ja — Japanese	jv — Javanese	ka — Georgian
kg — Kongo	ki — Kikuyu	kk — Kazakh
kl — Kalaallisut	km — Khmer	kn — Kannada
ko — Korean	kr — Kanuri	ks — Kashmiri
ku — Kurdish	kv — Komi	kw — Cornish
ky — Kyrgyz	la — Latin	lb — Luxembourgish
lg — Ganda	li — Limburgan	ln — Lingala
lo — Lao	lt — Lithuanian	lu — Luba-Kasai
lv — Latvian	mg — Malagasy	mh — Marshallese
mi — Māori	mk — Macedonian	ml — Malayalam
mn — Mongolian	mr — Marathi	ms — Malay
mt — Maltese	my — Burmese	ne — Nepali
nl — Dutch	nn — Norwegian Nynorsk	no — Norwegian
nv — Navajo	ny — Chichewa / Nyanja	oc — Occitan
om — Oromo	or — Odia	os — Ossetian
pa — Punjabi	pl — Polish	ps — Pashto
pt — Portuguese	qu — Quechua	rm — Romansh
rn — Kirundi	ro — Romanian	ru — Russian
rw — Kinyarwanda	sa — Sanskrit	sc — Sardinian
sd — Sindhi	se — Northern Sami	sg — Sango
si — Sinhala	sk — Slovak	sl — Slovenian
sm — Samoan	sn — Shona	so — Somali
sq — Albanian	sr — Serbian	ss — Swati
st — Sotho	su — Sundanese	sv — Swedish
sw — Swahili	ta — Tamil	te — Telugu
tg — Tajik	th — Thai	ti — Tigrinya
tk — Turkmen	tl — Tagalog	tn — Tswana
to — Tonga	tr — Turkish	ts — Tsonga
tt — Tatar	wl — Twi	ty — Tahitian
ug — Uyghur	uk — Ukrainian	ur — Urdu
uz — Uzbek	ve — Venda	vi — Vietnamese
vo — Volapük	wa — Walloon	wo — Wolof
xh — Xhosa	yi — Yiddish	yo — Yoruba
zh — Chinese	zu — Zulu

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later.

Resources

• PyPI Package

• Documentation

• GitHub Repository

Contact & Author

Author:

Mattia Rubino

Email:

textwizard.dev@gmail.com