"Write in English, Nobody Understands Your Language Here": A Study of Non-English Trends in Open-Source Repositories

TL;DR

This study analyzes the increasing use of multiple languages in open-source repositories, revealing growth in non-English participation and highlighting both inclusivity benefits and language barriers affecting collaboration.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of multilingual trends in OSS, covering 9.14 billion interactions across various languages and identifying shifts in language use from 2015 to 2025.

Findings

Multilingual participation has increased, especially in Korean, Chinese, and Russian.

Language diversity is evident in code comments, strings, and documentation.

Non-English projects tend to have less visibility and participation.

Abstract

The open-source software (OSS) community has historically been dominated by English as the primary language for code, documentation, and developer interactions. However, with growing global participation and better support for non-Latin scripts through standards like Unicode, OSS is gradually becoming more multilingual. This study investigates the extent to which OSS is becoming more multilingual, analyzing 9.14 billion GitHub issues, pull requests, and discussions, and 62,500 repositories across five programming languages and 30 natural languages, covering the period from 2015 to 2025. We examine six research questions to track changes in language use across communication, code, and documentation. We find that multilingual participation has steadily increased, especially in Korean, Chinese, and Russian. This growth appears not only in issues and discussions but also in code comments, string literals, and documentation files. While this shift reflects greater inclusivity and language diversity in OSS, it also creates language tension. The ability to express oneself in a native language can clash with shared norms around English use, especially in collaborative settings. Non-English or multilingual projects tend to receive less visibility and participation, suggesting that language remains both a resource and a barrier, shaping who gets heard, who contributes, and how open collaboration unfolds.