Are all Programming Languages in English?

How fun would it be to write code in your favorite language? But is there any programming language that uses non-English keywords? Let’s find out!

After some time spent searching for the right programming language for your project, you may have thought: “Hey, but is there a programming language with non-English keywords?”.

No? Ok, maybe I’m the only one wondering these strange things while doing researches for tools and languages for my projects!

But the question itself seems very interesting, so let’s find out.

A bit of History

When talking about programming (and programming languages in general), English seems to be a kind of lingua franca for writing computer programs. The reason is pretty obvious: modern programming languages are proud offsprings of other programming languages mainly developed in the United States in the mid of 20th century, so it seems natural that those languages evolved, maintaining the current language as a source vocables to be used as keywords.

A nice fact about programming languages: the first high-level programming was the Plankalkül. It has been developed by Konrad Zuse, a German engineer, between 1942 and 1945. Here it is a “Hello World” Program in Plankalkül:

(code source: Twitter)

Starting from the 1950s, a lot of notable programming languages began to come to life. In 1955, in fact, FLOW-MATIC appeared for the first time. Its syntax may be pretty familiar:

(code source: Wikipedia)

yes, you guessed it! FLOW-MATIC is an ancestor of COBOL. As you can see, the English language is strictly part of the programming language itself (just like in COBOL).