Only in the very beginning people use anything besides english
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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Do non-English speakers learn to code in English
Why should they?
Code is programming language, not natural language. If they have already learned some natural English, then maybe it seems practical. Otherwise, no reason to try that.
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(11 replies)
Well we learn to code in the programming language that the teacher choses, not in any natural language at all, so neither English nor our native languages.
But all significant programming languages that I know do have reserved control words that are taken from English. Maybe that is the direction of your question?
Then no, mostly we don't use specifically crafted or preprocessed programming languages just to have control words recognizable as words in our native languages. We just learn the English-based control words as features of the programming language, if we don't already recognize them.
As for the variable names and natural language comments embedded in the code, that we create, that varies. I'd say as soon as interlingual collaboration or code sharing is a possibility, people will go for English in my experience. And I suspect that people who have gone for English before tend to stick to English even in their private use.
This is also related to learning materials, documentation of language features and libraries being available to the largest degree in English.
I perceive it as easier to stick to English, rather than to code switch between natural language while I program.
@TheImpressiveX Back in 2000 I briefly taught at UC Santa Barbara. One class was a summer, two week course in Adobe Director for Japanese high school graduates prior to entering Ritsumeikan University. I cast about looking for a Japanese version of the program, but could not find it. One of the students later told me they wouldn't expect such a thing to exist, as English was the language of coding.
ymmv
There have been some interesting attempts to translate languages, but generally at most you would get phoneatically local names using English characters for functions and variables, etc.
I have no clue but at the very least, a programmer names their own variables and, barring any special characters, they could be named in any language.
i think it depends, for me at least, mostly being self taught, english entirely because I just think in english, search in english, speak in english to myself so much
The only things that tend to be in another language in code are variables and strings, from my experience.
I learned to code before I learned proper English as a child.
However, many educators insist of forcing students to first learn Hungarian pseudocode (not Hungarian notation) stuff first, I specifically was forced to learn Hungarian pseudocode SQL, because our teacher thought the future of programming will be natural language programming (she was a mediocre mathematician). Problems with it include:
- Hungarian is very antithetical to be used as keywords in a programming language, mainly by substituting affixes with different words, or keeping the affixes in certain ways.
- Students who already know English or actual coding are confused by it.
- Natural language programming is quite bad. Nothing is gained by throwing out programming symbols in favor of natural language. In fact, things are being lost, and the main advocates of NLP are just out-of-touch techbros, who think creation is about having a cool idea.
- Time that could been spent learning other things are wasted on it.