Language Detective: Asia

The Asian edition of Language Detective: every sentence comes from a language of Asia, from the Mediterranean coast to the Pacific. Some rounds are script-spotting — Thai, Khmer, Georgian and Korean give themselves away if you know the alphabet. Others are proper puzzles: Indonesian reads like nothing else on the page, and Persian hides inside Arabic-looking letters.

Ten languages per game, drawn from a pool of fifteen.

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

• Fifteen Asian languages, from Japanese, Hindi and Arabic to Khmer, Georgian and Indonesian. Each game draws ten.
• Arabic alone accepts more than twenty countries — ANY country where the language is official counts.

What's not included — and why

• No languages from outside Asia — the European and African editions carry those.
• No made-up or constructed languages, and no dialects without a national home.

Good to know

• Persian is written in Arabic-style letters but is an Indo-European language — a distant cousin of English, not of Arabic.
• Georgian's curly Mkhedruli alphabet belongs to Georgian alone — no other language on Earth uses it.
• Hindi and Urdu are close enough to chat in, yet they are written in two completely different scripts.