Language Detection in Python with NLTK Stopwords

from nltk.corpus import stopwords

# These are the available languages with stopwords from NLTK
NLTKlanguages=["dutch","finnish","german","italian",
               "portuguese","spanish","turkish","danish","english",
               "french","hungarian","norwegian","russian","swedish"]
# Just in case I add optional stopword lists

FREElanguages=[""]
languages=NLTKlanguages+FREElanguages
# Fill the dictionary of languages, to avoid unnecessary function calls
for lang in NLTKlanguages:
  dictiolist[lang]=stopwords.words(lang)


def scoreFunction(wholetext):
  """Get text, find most common words and compare with known
  stopwords. Return dictionary of values"""
  # C makes me program like this: create always empty stuff just in case
  dictiolist={}
  scorelist={}
  # Split all the text in tokens and convert to lowercase. In a
  # decent version of this, I'd also clean the unicode
  tokens=nltk.tokenize.word_tokenize(wholetext)
  tokens=[t.lower() for t in tokens]
  # Determine the frequency distribution of words, looking for the
  # most common words
  freq_dist=nltk.FreqDist(tokens)
  # This is the only interesting piece, and not by much. Pick a
  # language, and check if each of the 20 most common words is in
  # the language stopwords. If it's there, add 1 to this language
  # for each word matched. So the maximal score is 20. Why 20? No
  # specific reason, looks like a good number of words.
  for lang in languages:
    scorelist[lang]=0
    for word in freq_dist.keys()[0:20]:
      if word in dictiolist[lang]:
        scorelist[lang]+=1
  return scorelist

def whichLanguage(scorelist):
  """This function just returns the language name, from a given
  "scorelist" dictionary as defined above."""
  maximum=0
  for item in scorelist:
    value=scorelist[item]
    if maximum<value:
      maximum=value
      lang=item
  return lang

scoreFunction("e Operationen in der Karibik, ohne dass es dabei zu größeren See­schlachten gekommen wäre. In Europa war die erfolglose Belagerung des britischen Stütz­punktes Gibraltar die einzige nennens­werte Auseinander­setzung. Der englisch-­spanische Konflikt endete formell am 9. November 1729 mit dem Abschluss des Vertrages von Sevilla und der Wieder­herstellung des Status quo ante. Die grundsätzlichen Differenzen beider Staaten wurden jedoch nicht beseitigt, was kaum zehn Jahre später zum Ausbruch eines weiteren Krieges führte") 
> {'swedish': 0, 'portuguese': 0, 'english': 2, 'hungarian': 0, 'finnish': 0, 'turkish': 0, **'german': 5**, 'dutch': 3, 'french': 1, 'norwegian': 1, 'catalan': 0, 'spanish': 0, 'russian': 0, 'danish': 1, 'italian': 1} 
scoreFunction("Man vet forholdsvis lite om Merkur; bakkebaserte teleskop viser kun en opplyst halvmåne med begrensede detaljer. Mye av informasjonen om planeten ble samlet av Mariner 10 (1974–76) som kartla rundt 45 % av overflaten.") 
> {'swedish': 3, 'portuguese': 0, 'english': 0, 'hungarian': 0, 'finnish': 1, 'turkish': 1, 'german': 0, 'dutch': 2, 'french': 1, **'norwegian': 4**, 'catalan': 1, 'spanish': 1, 'russian': 0, 'danish': 2, 'italian': 0} 
scoreFunction("A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth, becoming visible against the solar disk. During a transit, Venus can be seen from Earth as a small black disk moving slowly across the face of the Sun") 
> {'swedish': 0, 'portuguese': 2, **'english': 9**, 'hungarian': 2, 'finnish': 0, 'turkish': 0, 'german': 0, 'dutch': 1, 'french': 1, 'norwegian': 0, 'catalan': 1, 'spanish': 1, 'russian': 0, 'danish': 0, 'italian': 1}