(Not really a Perl solution!) There was a publication somewhere recently which showed that by using Winzip or some similar compression package one could deduce which language a document was written in. In short, you compress a set of "reference" documents into an archive, and you repeat this for a number of different languages. You then add the unknown document to each language archive in turn and the one which increased in size the least should be the language of the unknown document (because most/all of the words in it will already be in the archive's dictionary table). It was suggested that this method could also be used to identify authorship -- I haven't used the method so don't know how well it works in practice. (Sorry, don't have a link for the original article). B