Listeners’ skill at identifying five target languages from short samples and discriminating the targets among a set of other languages was tested. Subjects in two groups, US and French, were generally quite successful in identification. Individual variation is poorly explained by degree of prior casual exposure to the target languages or academic linguistic training. Linguistic training does predict some greater success in discrimination. The implied language groupings which emerge from identification errors and in the discrimination phase are more informative from the largely linguist US subjects.