The present teaching relates to method, system, medium, and implementations for speech recognition in a spoken language. Upon receiving a speech signal representing an utterance of a speaker in one of a plurality of spoken languages, speech recognition is performed based on the speech signal in accordance with a plurality of speech recognition models corresponding to the plurality of spoken languages to generate a plurality of text strings each of which represents a speech recognition result in a corresponding one of the plurality of spoken languages. With respect to each of the plurality of text strings associated with a corresponding spoken language, a likelihood that the utterance is in the corresponding spoken language is computed. A spoken language of the utterance is determined based on the likelihood with respect to each of the plurality of text strings.