"Write in English, Nobody Understands Your Language Here": A Study of Non-English Trends in Open-Source Repositories
Journal: arXiv (Cornell University)
Year: 2026

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 acros