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Whisper supports transcription and translation for 99 languages. Performance varies significantly across languages based on training data availability and linguistic characteristics.

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Complete Language List

Whisper supports the following 99 languages:
  • Afrikaans (af)
  • Albanian (sq)
  • Amharic (am)
  • Arabic (ar)
  • Armenian (hy)
  • Assamese (as)
  • Azerbaijani (az)
  • Bashkir (ba)
  • Basque (eu)
  • Belarusian (be)
  • Bengali (bn)
  • Bosnian (bs)
  • Breton (br)
  • Bulgarian (bg)
  • Cantonese (yue)
  • Catalan (ca)
  • Chinese (zh)
  • Croatian (hr)
  • Czech (cs)
  • Danish (da)
  • Dutch (nl)
  • English (en)
  • Estonian (et)
  • Faroese (fo)
  • Finnish (fi)
  • French (fr)
  • Galician (gl)
  • Georgian (ka)
  • German (de)
  • Greek (el)
  • Gujarati (gu)
  • Haitian Creole (ht)
  • Hausa (ha)
  • Hawaiian (haw)
  • Hebrew (he)
  • Hindi (hi)
  • Hungarian (hu)
  • Icelandic (is)
  • Indonesian (id)
  • Italian (it)
  • Japanese (ja)
  • Javanese (jw)
  • Kannada (kn)
  • Kazakh (kk)
  • Khmer (km)
  • Korean (ko)
  • Lao (lo)
  • Latin (la)
  • Latvian (lv)
  • Lingala (ln)
  • Lithuanian (lt)
  • Luxembourgish (lb)
  • Macedonian (mk)
  • Malagasy (mg)
  • Malay (ms)
  • Malayalam (ml)
  • Maltese (mt)
  • Marathi (mr)
  • Mongolian (mn)
  • Myanmar (my)
  • Maori (mi)
  • Nepali (ne)
  • Norwegian (no)
  • Nynorsk (nn)
  • Occitan (oc)
  • Pashto (ps)
  • Persian (fa)
  • Polish (pl)
  • Portuguese (pt)
  • Punjabi (pa)
  • Romanian (ro)
  • Russian (ru)
  • Sanskrit (sa)
  • Serbian (sr)
  • Shona (sn)
  • Sindhi (sd)
  • Sinhala (si)
  • Slovak (sk)
  • Slovenian (sl)
  • Somali (so)
  • Spanish (es)
  • Sundanese (su)
  • Swahili (sw)
  • Swedish (sv)
  • Tagalog (tl)
  • Tajik (tg)
  • Tamil (ta)
  • Tatar (tt)
  • Telugu (te)
  • Thai (th)
  • Tibetan (bo)
  • Turkish (tr)
  • Turkmen (tk)
  • Ukrainian (uk)
  • Urdu (ur)
  • Uzbek (uz)
  • Vietnamese (vi)
  • Welsh (cy)
  • Yiddish (yi)
  • Yoruba (yo)

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Language Aliases

Some languages can be specified using alternative names:
AliasLanguage Code
Burmesemy (Myanmar)
Valencianca (Catalan)
Flemishnl (Dutch)
Haitianht (Haitian Creole)
Letzeburgeschlb (Luxembourgish)
Pushtops (Pashto)
Panjabipa (Punjabi)
Moldavian / Moldovanro (Romanian)
Sinhalesesi (Sinhala)
Castilianes (Spanish)
Mandarinzh (Chinese)

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Performance by Language

Whisper’s performance varies widely depending on the language. The figure below shows WER (Word Error Rate) or CER (Character Error Rate, in italic) for large-v3 and large-v2 models evaluated on Common Voice 15 and Fleurs datasets. WER breakdown by language
Lower WER/CER values indicate better performance. Additional metrics for other models can be found in Appendix D of the Whisper paper.

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Using Languages

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Specifying Language in Transcription

import whisper

model = whisper.load_model("turbo")

# Transcribe with language specified
result = model.transcribe("audio.mp3", language="Japanese")
print(result["text"])

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Command-line Usage

# Transcribe Japanese audio
whisper japanese.wav --language Japanese

# Can use language codes
whisper japanese.wav --language ja

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Automatic Language Detection

import whisper

model = whisper.load_model("turbo")

# Load audio
audio = whisper.load_audio("audio.mp3")
audio = whisper.pad_or_trim(audio)

# Create mel spectrogram
mel = whisper.log_mel_spectrogram(audio, n_mels=model.dims.n_mels).to(model.device)

# Detect language
_, probs = model.detect_language(mel)
detected_lang = max(probs, key=probs.get)
print(f"Detected language: {detected_lang}")
print(f"Confidence: {probs[detected_lang]:.2%}")

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Getting All Language Probabilities

import whisper

model = whisper.load_model("turbo")
audio = whisper.load_audio("audio.mp3")
audio = whisper.pad_or_trim(audio)
mel = whisper.log_mel_spectrogram(audio, n_mels=model.dims.n_mels).to(model.device)

_, probs = model.detect_language(mel)

# Show top 5 languages
top_langs = sorted(probs.items(), key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)[:5]
for lang, prob in top_langs:
    print(f"{lang}: {prob:.2%}")

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Translation to English

Translation is only supported to English. The turbo model is not trained for translation.

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Translating Non-English Speech

import whisper

# Use medium or large for translation
model = whisper.load_model("medium")

result = model.transcribe(
    "japanese.wav",
    language="Japanese",
    task="translate"
)
print(result["text"])  # English translation

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Command-line Translation

# Translate Japanese speech to English
whisper japanese.wav --model medium --language Japanese --task translate
For best translation results, use the medium or large models. The turbo model will return the original language even if --task translate is specified.

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Language-Specific Considerations

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Languages Without Spaces

For languages that don’t use spaces (Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Lao, Myanmar, Cantonese), the tokenizer uses special word splitting: 
# These languages split on unicode points instead of spaces
NO_SPACE_LANGS = {"zh", "ja", "th", "lo", "my", "yue"}

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Character-based Metrics

Some languages use Character Error Rate (CER) instead of Word Error Rate (WER) for evaluation:
  • Chinese (zh)
  • Japanese (ja)
  • Thai (th)
  • And other languages shown in italic in the performance chart

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Best Practices

High-Resource Languages

English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, and other widely-spoken languages generally have the best performance.

Low-Resource Languages

Less common languages may have higher error rates. Consider using larger models for better accuracy.

Language Detection

If unsure of the language, use automatic detection. It’s reliable for most well-represented languages.

Model Selection

Use larger models (medium, large) for better performance on challenging languages or translation tasks.

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Checking Language Support

from whisper.tokenizer import LANGUAGES, TO_LANGUAGE_CODE

# Get all supported languages
print(f"Total languages: {len(LANGUAGES)}")

# Check if a language is supported
if "ja" in LANGUAGES:
    print(f"Japanese: {LANGUAGES['ja']}")

# Look up language code by name
if "french" in TO_LANGUAGE_CODE:
    print(f"French code: {TO_LANGUAGE_CODE['french']}")

# List all languages
for code, name in LANGUAGES.items():
    print(f"{code}: {name}")

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