Question

How do I detect what language a text is written in using NLTK?

The examples I’ve seen use nltk.detect, but when I’ve installed it on my mac, I cannot find this package.

Answer 1

Have you come across the following code snippet?

english_vocab = set(w.lower() for w in nltk.corpus.words.words())
text_vocab = set(w.lower() for w in text if w.lower().isalpha())
unusual = text_vocab.difference(english_vocab) 

from http://groups.google.com/group/nltk-users/browse_thread/thread/a5f52af2cbc4cfeb?pli=1&safe=active

Or the following demo file?

https://web.archive.org/web/20120202055535/http://code.google.com/p/nltk/source/browse/trunk/nltk_contrib/nltk_contrib/misc/langid.py