diff --git a/whisperx/asr.py b/whisperx/asr.py
index b23a54dc..ba6220bd 100644
--- a/whisperx/asr.py
+++ b/whisperx/asr.py
@@ -251,7 +251,10 @@ def data(audio, segments):
 
 
     def detect_language(self, audio: np.ndarray):
-        segment = log_mel_spectrogram(audio[: N_SAMPLES], padding=0)
+        if audio.shape[0] < N_SAMPLES:
+            print("Warning: audio is shorter than 30s, language detection may be inaccurate.")
+        segment = log_mel_spectrogram(audio[: N_SAMPLES],
+                                      padding=0 if audio.shape[0] >= N_SAMPLES else N_SAMPLES - audio.shape[0])
         encoder_output = self.model.encode(segment)
         results = self.model.model.detect_language(encoder_output)
         language_token, language_probability = results[0][0]