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, generate as an output from the universal phoneme decoder a stream of the identified phonemes and phoneme sequences for each of the two or more candidate languages, wherein the streams include a first stream of phonemes from the identified phonemes for a first of the two or more candidate languages, and a second stream of phonemes from the identified phonemes for a second of the two or more candidate languages, determine a confidence rating on an accuracy of an identification of the first candidate language of the two or more candidate languages for the first stream and an accuracy of an identification of the second candidate language of the two or more candidate languages for the second stream, and identify a particular human language being spoken in the received audio stream from the two or more candidate languages based on the confidence ratings; and a processor to implement the modules making up the language identification engine.