That's from a test here. I got 30/30 and I suspect a lot of readers of Page F30 will get the same or nearly the same result. What is just as interesting as the test though are the results afterward showing which languages were hardest to identify. Those results are a spoiler for those that want to take the test though so I'll write the rest of the post in a light font. Highlight the rest of the post to read it. And don't click that link that says here unless you want to see the results and thus know the answers.









First of all, the results are here , and range from an impressive 98% correct score for French to only 1.8% for Maltese. It's interesting how French managed to get such a high score while Spanish was only at 67.6%, which shows how much wide (but perhaps shallow) knowledge there is of the language among L2 users. Spanish is more L1 heavy. The large number of students of German can also be seen in its 90.7%.





Korean managed to score higher than Japanese as well, and the reason for that is likely the fact that no other language (well, except Cia-Cia) uses Hangul as its script. A lot of people probably got Chinese and Japanese mixed up.







Arabic is quite high; if Persian was mixed in there it probably would have dropped a bit.







Greek is actually quite low (34.4%) considering its use in mathematics. Perhaps people just aren't used to seeing more than one Greek letter at a time. δ and β and α and γ and everything else by themselves are fine, but seeing them together as something like καλύτερη all of a sudden looks quite foreign.







Icelandic is only at 12% but that's much higher than Maltese (1.6%), even though Maltese has about twice as many speakers. Seeing an ħ is a sign that you're dealing with Maltese but for most the þ and ð of Icelandic are more familiar.







Turkish is spoken by a lot of people and Turkic languages are spread throughout Central Asia, but in spite of this Turkish only got 8.9%. This was a bit of a surprise. Then again, the example given doesn't include any letters that really stick out in Turkish and not other languages like ğ/Ğ, ι and İ. Add those and it might go up a bit.