It seems we have reached a point where we no longer need technical code in languages such as Python or SQL to command the computer; we just talk. “The hottest new programming language is English,” Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former chief of AI who recently returned to OpenAI, tweeted a few months ago. 

With generative AI taking over the internet, communicating has become a craft, known as prompt engineering. ??A well-crafted prompt gives the user an upper hand as the AI engine can generate intended outputs. Hence, prompt engineering is becoming an essential skill for the technological ecosystem. 

If technology requires knowledge of human languages, then the main language to know is, without question, English. It is rationally essential as the codebases of most major programming languages, APIs and libraries are written with variable names, comments, and documentation in English. It’s no surprise that English is the lingua franca of computing. After all, many of the tech innovations we know and love today were birthed in the USA, where English was deemed the perfect fit for machines. From HTML to the iPod, it’s all been in English.

The Second Language

Truthfully, the first ever website was not written in HTML but in English HTML. It seems the ‘initial promise of the web’ was only for English-speaking users. Like it or not, good old English is the ‘default’ language of tech. But what if we lived in a world where Russian HTML or Swahili Javascript was as common?

But that is not really such a good idea. The English language is aptly geared towards all things technical. When you start, for example, programming in Russian, you quickly run into an amusing issue: Almost all words in Russian change based on the gender of the object they correspond to. Adjectives, verbs, and more. In addition, you can immediately identify the gender of any noun with 98% certainty by its word ending.

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, was criticised a few years ago for his opinion insisting kids should learn to code instead of studying English as a second language. “If I were a French student and I were 10 years old, I think it would be more important to learn to code than English,” Cook told French news outlet, Konbini. By making that statement, the CEO of the iPhone maker expressed a common misconception that programming is about speaking to computers in some obscure machine language and has nothing to do with humans. 

Over the Communication Barrier

Scratch and Blockly are two languages specially designed for children to learn how to code. A study by Scratch showed that children who learned to code in their native language learned faster than those stuck in another language. 

Another language called ‘Prolog’ was created in the 1970s by two Frenchmen and uses sentences formed in any language as a base for logic programming. ‘Linotte’ is another language that uses French words. Additionally, in many languages such as C, the user can assign french words to keywords such as IF, THEN, FOR, and NEXT in header declaration.

The Russians have likewise created a programming language based on Russian words and syntax. ‘Ezhil’ is a Tamil script-based programming language in grade schools to enable learning ‘BASIC’ or ‘LOGO’ in the Tamil language. 

That is not all. 

Since translating programming languages is totally doable, people have made programming languages just for kicks. Take LOLCODE, for instance. It’s based on lolcats and kicks off a programme with ‘HAI’ and ends with ‘KTHXBAI’. There’s also ‘Whitespace’, which is completely invisible to the human eye and made up of sneaky characters like spaces, tabs, and line breaks. Not to forget, ‘Pikachu’—a programming language that uses only pi, pika, and Pikachu. Who knows, maybe one day Pikachu will ditch Ash and become a programming prodigy instead!

Programming languages are abundant in the tech realm and programming itself is like a universal language for both humans and machines. While English remains the dominant language of technology, efforts are being made to make coding more accessible to people of different languages and cultures. We may even witness the rise of programming languages like ‘Klingon’ or ‘Dothraki’ one day. 

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