1. A language identification engine, comprising: a front-end module having an input to receive an audio stream; a universal phoneme decoder to identify phonemes and phoneme sequences in the audio stream in each of two or more candidate languages; a run-time language identifier module to receive the phonemes and phoneme sequences identified by the universal phoneme decoder and identify a particular human language being spoken in the received audio stream from the two or more candidate languages; and a processor to implement the modules making up the language identification engine.