There's no way you can decide whether a word is English, German, French, Italian, or whatever other language based on the word alone.

While this statement is true you can take a damn good stab at the language from the words as in plural. In the post below I suggest processing the doc using hash table lookups and counting the instances of putative german, english, french, and italian words. After this is complete you examine the word counts for each languague. As the document length increases so does the probability that the languague with the highest word count is the languague. In fact for docs over a few dozen words you can be almost certain. So you process the document assuming it is german (default lang) and reprocess it using the correct languague as the dominant template if you were wrong.

cheers

tachyon

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