Language Detective: Africa

The African edition of Language Detective: every sentence comes from a language of Africa — Swahili, Amharic, Somali, Zulu, Malagasy and Arabic. It is the shortest edition and arguably the hardest: most players have never seen written Somali or Malagasy, and Amharic arrives in a script most of the world can't place.

Six languages per game — the whole pool, in a new order with new sentences every run.

How to play

• Read the sentence in the middle of the screen, then type a country into the search box.
• Pick a suggestion or press Enter to lock in a guess. Guess as many times as you like — a wrong country drops out of the list.
• A guess is correct if the language is official (or the de-facto national language) in the country you named.
• Stuck on one? Hit Skip to reveal the answer and move on — a skipped language does not score.
• When you get it right (or skip), the game reveals the language, an English translation and every country that would have counted.
• The clock counts up from your first guess — it is a stopwatch, not a time limit.

What counts in this quiz

• Six African languages: Swahili, Amharic, Somali, Zulu, Malagasy and Arabic. Every game uses all six.
• Arabic accepts every country where it is official, across North Africa and beyond — ANY one of them counts.

What's not included — and why

• No European colonial languages as answers of their own — French and Portuguese rounds live in the other editions, even though both are official across Africa.
• No made-up or constructed languages, and no dialects without a national home.

Good to know

• Malagasy is not related to its African neighbours at all — it arrived in Madagascar from Borneo, across the whole Indian Ocean.
• Amharic's Ge'ez script is one of the world's oldest alphabets still in daily use.
• Swahili is an official language in more than one country, and a lingua franca for perhaps 200 million people.