Which Languages Can Turnitin AI Detect? Full List (2026)

Turnitin's AI writing detector now reads seven languages: English, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Dutch, German and Turkish. If your paper is in any other language, such as Chinese, French, Korean, Portuguese, Welsh or Norwegian, Turnitin still checks it for similarity but gives no AI score. Here is the full list, when each language was added, and what each one covers.

Languages Turnitin AI detection supports

Turnitin's own guide states that its "AI paraphrasing and bypassing detection capabilities are only available for English submissions." So a Spanish or German paper gets an overall AI percentage and highlighted sentences, but not the purple "AI-paraphrased" group you may have seen on English reports.

Languages Turnitin AI does not detect

Every other language is unsupported for AI detection. That includes Chinese, French, Korean, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Russian, Hindi, Malay, Indonesian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Welsh, Irish and Hebrew. Turnitin's guide is clear about what happens: if a paper in a non-supported language is submitted, the detector does not process it and no AI report is generated. The AI indicator shows an empty or error state instead of a percentage.

Specific questions we get asked:

• Can Turnitin detect Chinese AI? No. See can Turnitin detect Chinese AI writing for what that means for Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland students.
• Is there a Welsh AI detector in Turnitin? No. Welsh-medium work in Wales gets a similarity report only. See our Wales guide.
• French, Norwegian, Korean? Not supported. Universities in those countries often use other tools, such as Compilatio in France or CopyKiller in Korea.

Requirements for an AI score in any language

• At least 300 words of prose in long-form writing (sentences and paragraphs, not bullet points or tables).
• No more than 30,000 words per file.
• File under 100 MB in .docx, .pdf, .txt or .rtf.
• Written mainly in one supported language.

Papers that mix two languages

Turnitin sends each submission to one language model. A paper that switches between a supported and an unsupported language, such as English with long Chinese passages, can give an unreliable result. A Hong Kong Baptist University student publication reported a mixed Chinese-English project flagged at 40% AI that dropped below 20% once the languages were separated. If your paper mixes languages, check it before you submit.

Which products include multilingual AI detection

• Turnitin Originality (used inside Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, Brightspace and Feedback Studio): includes AI detection for all seven languages, if your institution has it switched on.
• iThenticate 2.0 (used by researchers and publishers): AI detection is an add-on.
• Not included: Microsoft Teams Assignments similarity checks and Gradescope.

What a Turnitin AI report looks like

These samples come from an English paper: 1% similarity, 51% AI. Reports for Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Dutch, German and Turkish use the same layout.

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Screenshots shown for illustration. Your own reports arrive as full PDFs in your dashboard.

Check your paper in your language

1. Create an account and buy a slot.
2. Upload your .docx or .pdf.
3. Download both reports from your dashboard, usually within minutes.

$3.99 USD per document. Buy 10 slots, get 1 free: every 10 slots you pay for come with 1 free.

AI score too high? Humanize it to 0%

If your Turnitin AI writing report flags your paper, you can rewrite the highlighted sentences yourself, use a humanizer, or let our editors do it by hand. Since August 2025 Turnitin also detects text run through AI humanizer tools, so check which approach still works: best AI humanizer for Turnitin, can Turnitin detect humanizers? and how to get 0% AI on Turnitin.

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