English remains the dominant language of open-source code, documentation and developer interaction, although GitHub is becoming more multilingual.

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Location PART 2 - FOUR HIDDEN CHIMNEYS CHAPTER 6: SCAFFOLDING FOR INFLUENCE Dangers of Entrepreneurship

"English remains the dominant language of open-source code, documentation and developer interaction, although GitHub is becoming more multilingual."

A study of 9.14 billion GitHub interactions and 62,500 repositories describes English as the historical lingua franca of open source while documenting rapid growth in non-English use from 2015 to 2025.

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

Source authors Masudul Hasan Masud Bhuiyan; Manish Kumar Bala Kumar; Cristian-Alexandru Staicu

Source year 2026

Confidence high

Importance mid