Oops
Since you bring it up, no it wouldn’t. It would be much easier to find someone in the Netherlands who didn’t speak English than to find someone in Ireland who didn’t.
Universal Translator.
For real. Smart phones do all the work. If it’s spoken, use Google Translate. Written, use Google Goggles.
I was going to chime in this thread and mention that you specifically seem to be pretty good at this. I didn’t realize you were a professional. 
In New York City there are still neighborhoods where it is common for people’s first language to be Yiddish, and for Yiddish to be the main language people speak on the streets. Whether any of them are actually monolingual I don’t know.
Yes, of course, but I meant a historical holdover in the procedures that govern the printing of the chart, not that the document itself was from the 30s.
I expect the Department of Homeland Security didn’t write up all of its internal policies from scratch when it was laid down ; like all mergers/re-organizations they built heavily on infrastructure that had already been laid down ages ago, which were themselves updates of existing stuff, yadda yadda. As long as something doesn’t needlessly cost a large amount of money or breaks things there’s little reason or drive to scratch it from the books & procedures. God knows large organisations & administrations practically run on mindlessly applying Kafkaesque procedures… Certainly plenty of laws, regulations, ordinances and so forth remain or have remained in the books long after they’d become obsolete.
IOW, bureaucratic common sense* would IMO have it that since it doesn’t cost much of anything to keep Yiddish on the language look-up charts, and since evidently there *must *have been a need for it to be there at some point else it wouldn’t be there to begin with, why remove it (even if no one can quite remember what that need was) ?
*which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike regular common sense 
Monolingual Irish Speaker (from 1985).
I can attest to that. My eldest paternal aunt failed first grade because she spoke German and not English. She was born Canadian. My grandparents banned their household from speaking German after that. My dad was next in line, and he is about 2 year younger than she. I don’t think either of them speak or understand it.
Nobody in the family can speak it now, except perhaps my grandmother, who has nobody with which to converse in German. She speaks perfect English, unaccented, so she isn’t isolated.
My mom is a first generation Canadian, and speaks almost no German either. She can probably curse in it, but she isn’t the type to do that.
If ever there was a candidate for an “Ask the…” thread!
Wait, do you mean you do this for written texts, or for scenarios as described in the OP?
For example:
Step 1: You are introduced to a West African-looking man speaking an unidentified language.
Step 2: …
Step 3: …
[…]
Step n-1: …
Step n: You triumphantly announce, “he’s a Tiv, and he’s speaking Tiv.”
What are the intermediate steps?
Having extensive experience with Google Translate, I am very sceptical.
Today, Google Chrome asked me on two occasions if I wanted it to translate a page for me. The first one, it said “This page is in Italian”. The second, “This page is in Catalan”.
Both pages were in English.
Johanna, I’m really curious about your talent and your job, or how you use your skill professionally. Would you mind starting a thread or just posting a bit here, or point me to another thread where you might have already explained what you do and how many languages you know?
In post #30, I had thought that **Johanna **was referring to written language identification, and not spoken.
I’m curious too. I’m especially interested in how a person becomes a language identifier. Do you just get a degree in Linguistics? Is there a certificate or credential just for Language Identifiers, such as a “Certified Language Identifier” credential you can show to police or emergency response agencies so that they will hire you?
Yea my wife got into this band from Africa and they sing in …a language I don’t remember, not only did all translation services online not have it it was hard to even search for it in text.
Well, it isn’t necessarily about the intermediate steps that can be summarized into a recipe to follow. It’s more a matter of having developed extensive background knowledge across world language families. Putting in the hours of familiarizing oneself with the salient characteristics of many different language families, plus the isolates. Having a massive memory of linguistic data plus an efficient indexing system. A combination of having extensive memory in your head and knowing where to go look up any information needed.
You need your own memory and system of indexing it to get started. Then you can build on that by knowing what further information to look up, if necessary.
How far does this go? Could you, for example, recognize Kanuri or Daba?
It’s true that I do much better with written languages. But I have done some audio identification.
Oh goodness, no. When I worked in a language shop, people just knew I was the go-to gal for identifying languages. It was just a once in a while thing since the other people I worked with were pretty good at routine identification themselves, but I was available to be called in when the regulars got stumped.
It amazes me how metal and electronica fans can distinguish so many finely split micro-grades of musical genres when the stuff pretty much all sounds the same to me, since I’m a fan of neither. How they can listen to a song and peg it to a given genre I’ve never heard of is beyond me. I’m even more hopeless with identifying makes, models, and years of cars. But if I were a car nut, I’d have the familiarity with all the different features to be able to place them. So knowing my languages is probably analogous to holding such fan-girl trivia in one’s mind.
drums table Ask-the thread! Ask-the thread! Ask-the thread!
Please?
The former, probably. The latter would take a lot longer. I’m rather weak in Nilo-Saharan.