Methods and apparatus for language identification

In a multi-lingual environment, a method and apparatus for determining a language spoken in a speech utterance. The method and apparatus test acoustic feature vectors extracted from the utterances against acoustic models associated with one or more of the languages. Speech to text is then performed for the language indicated by the acoustic testing, followed by textual verification of the resulting text. During verification, the resulting text is processed by language specific NLP and verified against textual models associated with the language. The system is self-learning, i.e., once a language is verified or rejected, the relevant feature vectors are used for enhancing one or more acoustic models associated with one or more languages, so that acoustic determination may improve.