Random Language Generator

Press Generate Language and you get one language name from a list of 100, along with the first letter of its alphabet written in its own script, such as अ (A) for Hindi, あ (A) for Japanese or А (A) for Russian. That's the whole tool: a language randomizer for when you want the decision made for you. It doesn't invent made-up languages, and it doesn't show speaker counts or where a language is spoken.

What's in the list

The 100 languages run roughly in order of how many people speak them, starting with Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese and finishing with smaller languages like Konkani, Aramaic, Dogri, Sakha, Lao and Tharu. Because the list follows speaker numbers, two regions are heavily represented:

• South Asia: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Bhojpuri, Maithili, both Eastern and Western Punjabi, Konkani and Dogri.
• Chinese varieties: Mandarin, Yue (Cantonese), Min Nan, Hakka, Jin and Xiang are listed separately.

European languages such as French, German, Italian, Polish, Turkish and Bulgarian are there, as are African ones like Hausa and Yoruba, plus Korean, Vietnamese, Javanese, Indonesian, Burmese and Egyptian Arabic. Every click shuffles the full list and returns one entry, so the same language can come up twice in a row.

What the letter on the card means

Under the language name is a single character with its romanization in parentheses. For alphabetic and abugida scripts it's the first letter of that alphabet: the Latin A for Spanish and Turkish, Devanagari अ for Hindi and Marathi, Bengali অ, Telugu అ, Tamil அ, Arabic ا for Urdu and Persian, Hangul 아 for Korean, Cyrillic А for Russian and Bulgarian, Burmese အ, Lao ອ. For the Chinese varieties, which don't have an alphabet, the card shows the character 我 ("I") with its pronunciation in that variety: Wǒ in Mandarin, Ngóh in Cantonese, Góa in Min Nan. It's a quick visual clue to which writing system the language uses.

Ways to use a random language picker

• Choosing what to learn next. If you've been stuck between three Duolingo courses for a month, let the button decide, then commit for 30 days.
• Classroom warm-ups. Generate a language, then have students find where it's spoken, which family it belongs to and what its script looks like.
• Polyglot and streamer challenges. "Say hello in whatever comes up" works well with a list this broad, since Jin Chinese or Tharu will humble almost anyone.
• Worldbuilding and character sheets. Assign a fictional character a native language without defaulting to the same five every time.

Go from a language to actual words

Once you've landed on a language, several tools here give you vocabulary in it. The Random Spanish Word Generator, Random French Word Generator and German Word Generator cover the big European courses; the Japanese Word Generator and Arabic Word Generator cover two of the scripts shown on the cards; and the Random Latin Word Generator is there for the one language on nobody's speaker-count list. You can see all word & language generators for the rest.