  This paper describes experiments on identifying the language of a single name
in isolation or in a document written in a different language. A new corpus has
been compiled and made available, matching names against languages. This corpus
is used in a series of experiments measuring the performance of general
language models and names-only language models on the language identification
task. Conclusions are drawn from the comparison between using general language
models and names-only language models and between identifying the language of
isolated names and the language of very short document fragments. Future
research directions are outlined.
