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 on the IETF Tools web site.

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:

Amazon Comprehend detects the following languages.

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
        }
    ]
}