Language

Human language is a complex subject, and it has a lot of influence on how we search for addresses.

Language Introduction

The following table shows which countries support which languages, what the default language is, and which languages are supported by Naurt's parser.

• Canada, Belgium and Switzerland are special cases, please see those sections

Searching With an Address

If you include an address in your search, the general rule is that the returned address will be in the same language as the search language.

Some languages support the parser. If you are not using a parsed request, Naurt will attempt to first parse your address using our parser. In general, a parsed address has much better search accuracy than an unparsed address. If a language does not support a parser, it is because in general a parser is not required. Chinese, for example, general has unique enough addresses to get very good search performance without the use of a parser.

If any Arabic is used in searching countries with Arabic support, the entire address search will be considered Arabic, and the parser will not be used. The same is true for any Chinese, Korean or Japanese characters.

Reverse Geocode

When reverse geocoding, there may be a need to specify a language desired. To avoid having mixed languages appear when reverse geocoding, Naurt has selected a default language per country. If no language is specified, the default language in the above template will be used. If forward geocoding, then there is no need to specify a language as it will use whichever language was searched with. Naurt does not offer translation services.

The language specification is done using ISO 639 Language Codes. The currently supported languages are

• AR - Arabic
• AUTO - Default (uses the default language for any country - this option is used if language is not specified)
• DA - Danish
• DE - German
• EN - English
• ES - Spanish
• FI - Finnish
• FR - French
• IT - Italian
• JA - Japanese
• KO - Korean
• NL - Dutch
• NO - Norwegian
• PT - Portuguese
• ZH - Chinese

Please be aware that the language field will under some circumstances cause nothing to be found. For example, using the English language tag in Japan nothing will be found, as there are no English addresses in Japan.

This can be specified using the language field in a request

{
    "location": {
        "latitude": 24.49,
        "longitude": 54.41
    },
    "language": "EN"
}

If you do not specify a language, then AUTO will be used. In other words

{
    "location": {
        "latitude": 24.49,
        "longitude": 54.41
    }
}

is equivalent to

{
    "location": {
        "latitude": 24.49,
        "longitude": 54.41
    },
    "language": "AUTO"
}

AUTO will use the default language, as specified in the table above.

Belgium and Switzerland Special Case

Belgium and Switzerland both have three languages.

For Belgium this is French, Dutch (also known as Flemish in Belgium) and German. French is mostly spoken in the South, Dutch in the North, and German in small portions of the East.

In Switzerland the languages are French, German and Italian. French is mostly spoken in the West, German in the North, East and Centre, and Italian in small portions of the South.

In Belgium and Switzerland, the languages are non-overlapping in the Naurt coverage. For example, in the French speaking region of Belgium there are no Dutch or German addresses. Therefore, when reverse geocoding in Belgium or Switzerland our suggestion is to not specify a language and use Auto.

Canada Special Case

Unfortunately, due to upstream address suppliers, Canadian addresses are mixed English/French. In general, addresses in Québec are in French and addresses elsewhere are in English. Due to upstream restrictions, Canada is only classed in the API as having English support. Therefore, when reverse geocoding in Canada, never specify French otherwise no results will be found.