How to Play Languagle
Every day, Languagle shows a phrase written in its own native script. You have six guesses to name the language it is in. There is no audio and no translation to lean on at the start. Instead, every guess you make comes back with a clue based on geography, so even a wrong answer tells you which direction to guess in next.
If you already play daily puzzle games like Wordle or geography guessers like Worldle, Languagle will feel familiar: one puzzle a day, a fixed number of guesses, and a colour-coded row that narrows things down after every try. Languagle borrows Wordle's daily format and Worldle's geography-based scoring, and points both at a new target: the language behind the phrase, not a word or a country.
The rules
Type a language into the guess box and submit it. You can optionally guess a country first: this filters the language list down to languages actually spoken there, which narrows a long list fast, but it is entirely optional and never costs you a guess. Only language guesses count against your total of six.
Reading the clues
Each guess lights up five blocks. The first four measure the distance between your guess's home country and the answer's home country:
- Zero blocks lit: over 8,000km away, roughly the distance from London to Tokyo.
- One block: within 8,000km, so at least the right side of the world, like Paris to New York.
- Two blocks: within 4,000km, the right region, like Madrid to Istanbul.
- Three blocks: within 1,500km, the right neighbourhood, like Paris to Berlin.
- Four blocks: the right country, but the wrong language.
- Five blocks: correct. That is the exact language, and the game ends.
Those distances are measured between capital cities, or the largest city where a language's home is a region rather than a country.
Because languages are compared by their primary home country, a guess can occasionally look odd right after using the country filter. Filter to Belgium and German will show up in the list, since it really is spoken there, but the guess row and its distance still measure from Germany, German's primary home.
When your guess is a close relative
A handful of answers are one specific variety of a larger language, such as Egyptian Arabic alongside Arabic, or Swiss German alongside German. Guess a relative of the answer and the row will say Same family instead of showing a distance. That means the answer is a different variety of that same language, so the move is to try its relatives next rather than crossing the whole language off your list.
Playing previous days
Once you have finished a puzzle, a day picker appears above the phrase. The arrows step back through every previous Languagle, so if you found the game partway through the week you can go back and play the ones you missed properly, rather than only reading the answers in the archive.
A day you have already finished stays finished: reopening it shows the board as you left it rather than letting you play it again. Past days do not count towards your streak either, since a streak is meant to measure coming back each day rather than how many you can clear in one sitting.
Where the phrases come from
Languagle's corpus currently holds 591 phrases across 182 languages, each one sourced and checked against its native script rather than transliterated into the Latin alphabet. A new phrase is featured once per day, so the game moves through a different language, script and region each time rather than repeating a small pool of familiar ones.
Why geography, not audio
Most language guessing games rely on hearing an accent. Languagle is built around the written word instead, and geography turns "I have no idea" into a real first move: knowing that a phrase's home is somewhere near Southeast Asia is enough to start ruling languages in and out, even before you can read a word of the script itself. It is the same instinct Worldle players use to place a country from its silhouette, applied here to a language instead of a shape on a map.