Most libraries acquire material in different languages.   Sometimes though the language may be unfamiliar to the cataloger or be similar to another language.  The Language Identifier from Xerox can help you identify whether your material is in Portuguese or Spanish.  Currently 47 different languages can be identified from Albanian to Welsh.

Another language identifier is the TextCat Demo which came about from a paper presented during the Third Annual Symposium on Document Analysis and Information Retrieval in 1994. A wider range of languages can be identified from Afrikaans to Yiddish with a total of 76 languages.