in english the pejorative term is 'cult', which often trips up second-language speakers from languages where it's the other way around

To help avoid future misunderstandings, which modern languages use "cult" without the usual negative implications?

the ones i'm thinking of are spanish, french, and portuguese, but i suspect it holds for most languages with a cognate of 'cult' and/or 'sect'

they used to be the other way around in english too

https://www.etymonline.com/word/sect

https://www.etymonline.com/word/cult

Russian and Ukrainian are a couple of examples. "Sect" is pejorative, the polite version is derived from the Latin word "confession".

I believe English is actually one of the only ones where cult has a negative connotation, and where sect does not. French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Russian - all of these use "cult" to mean any religious group, even in official language ("the Catholic cult"), and all use "sect" to mean "a fringe, possibly dangerous, religious or quasi-religious group" ("the members of that sect that poisoned themselves").

holy shit you speak a lot of languages

respect

Oh, not even close. I speak Romanian, English, and French. For all of the others I looked up Google translations of the phrase "I think he joined a cult" - in all of them, the translation replaced "cult" with some equivalent of "sect".

Also, I noticed that for more obscure languages (including Romanian), it didn't, so that confirmed to me it's not some fully hardocded conversion - for languages where it has enough examples it understands the "proper" translation, for those where it doesn't it does the simpler thing.

The other comment mentions dutch- As a dutchie I'm not entirely sure they're correct that "kult" is less negatively charged than "sekte". They both take on negative connotations depending on context- "sekte" is definitely religious, while "kult" isn't necessarily, based on the van Dale dictionary. I'd say "cult" isn't always negative in english either, the term "cult classic" comes to mind.

For that matter, would you use "sect" in english and be confident it would not be seen as pejorative term? I feel it's all context dependent.

I also don't think looking through google translate with a single phrase is the right method to figure this out- for one thing I've heard the european languages are usually heavily based on legislature (eu legislature is published in all eu languages, so an excellent source of translations). In my experience google translate can be stilted and formal, so which implications and connotations a phrase or term has in different languages can definitely be literally "lost in translation".