Can you hear the difference between Slovak and Slovenian? Our new language quiz will find out

What does Icelandic actually sound like? How do you recognise Welsh? And can you tell Malay from Indonesian – just by listening?

We work with voices from all over the world every day. Our voice database covers more than 40 languages, from the big world languages to real rarities: Kannada, Maltese, Luxembourgish, Swiss German. With that much material, an idea was bound to land on the table at some point: surely we could turn this into a game.

So we did. It's called “Guess the language – the listening quiz”, and you can play it for free right now: www.speaker-search.de/sprachenquiz

How it works

The principle takes ten seconds to explain: you hear a real voice recording from our archive – spoken by professional native speakers – and get three languages to choose from. One of them is right. Ten rounds, and you'll know whether you have a beginner's ear or a true world ear.

But beware: the game gets meaner with every round. At first you only have to tell Thai from Catalan. Later, suddenly Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are side by side – or Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian. That's when the wheat is separated from the chaff.

Every answer comes with a fun fact for showing off. Did you know that Icelanders can still read 800-year-old Viking sagas today? That Slovenian has its own grammatical form for exactly two things – handy for declarations of love? Or that “orangutan” is Malay and literally means “person of the forest”?

Real voices instead of computer announcements

What makes the quiz special: no machine is talking here. Every single sample comes from our real archive – commercials, audiobooks, audio guides, corporate films, recorded by the professional voice artists we produce with every day. So you're not hearing just any language example, but how these languages sound when professionals are at the microphone.

The game contains more than 200 samples in over 40 languages. And because it remembers what you've already heard, it stays fresh even on your fifth run: it automatically favours languages and voices you haven't had yet.

Take it with you on your phone

The quiz runs right in your browser – on your phone, your tablet and at your desk when nobody's looking. On a smartphone you can install it like an app via “Add to Home Screen”, complete with its own icon. No account, no ads, no tracking – just play.

And if you get ten out of ten: use the share button to send your result straight to your colleagues and challenge them to a duel. Fair warning, though: in our team the top spots on the leaderboard are hotly contested – some of us listen to voice samples every day, which is practically doping.

And if you want to book the voice behind it?

Then you've come to the right place anyway. Every language in the quiz is a language we can cast for your production – with native-speaking professional voice artists, from TV commercials to e-learning.

Have fun guessing:

Play now →