The English language is sometimes described as the lingua franca of computing. Computer science utilizes English as its primary conduit.
The prevalence of English in computing is a consequence of both historical and technical factors. The United States and the United Kingdom — both countries with English-speaking majorities — had prominent roles in the development and popularization of computer systems, computer networks, software and information technology.
Moreover, the technical limitations of early computers, combined with the lack of international standardization on the Internet, meant that English continued to dominate computing until innovations in internet infrastructure and increases in computer speed changed these earlier conditions. The domination of English, however, should not overshadow the technological innovations and additions to computer science that utilize other languages. Also, many widely used English-based technologies were not produced in the United States or the United Kingdom. For example, Ruby was made in Japan.
While English is still influential to various other languages with regard to computers and computing technologies, now most software products are localized in numerous languages and the invention of Unicode character encoding has resolved problems with non-Latin alphabets.
History Computer science has an ultimately mathematical foundation which was laid by non-English speaking cultures. The first mathematically literate societies in the Ancient Near East recorded methods for solving mathematical problems in steps. The word 'algorithm' comes from the name of a famous medieval Arabic mathematician who contributed to the spread of Hindu-Arabic numerals, al-Khwārizmī. The first systematic treatment of binary numbers was completed by Leibniz, a German mathematician. Leibniz wrote his treatise on the topic in French, the lingua franca of science at the time, and innovations in what is now called computer hardware occurred outside of an English tradition, with Pascal inventing the first mechanical calculator, and Leibniz improving it.
Interest in building computing machines first emerged in the 19th century, with the coming of the Second Industrial Revolution. The origins of computing in an English tradition began in this era with Charles Babbage's conceptualization of the Difference and Analytical Engine, George Boole's work on logic, and Herman Hollerith's invention of the tabulating machine for specific use in the 1890 United States census. At the time, Britain enjoyed near complete hegemonic power in the West at the height of the Pax Britannica, and America was experiencing an economic and demographic boom. By the time of the interwar period in the early 20th century, the most important mathematics related to the development of computing was being done in English, which was also beginning to become the new lingua franca of science.
In recent years, some scholars have begun to more critically study the dominance of the English language in computing. For instance, the historian Thomas Mullaney studies how Chinese computing responded to the problem of the QWERTY keyboard, which by nature of its limited key selection was not initially very accessible for Chinese computer users due to the difference between the English and Chinese languages. In his book The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age, he examines the innovative strategies that Chinese computer users have used to overcome this challenge, among others. Meanwhile, the scholar Mark Warschauer has studied internet usage across different global contexts, writing about how an over-abundance of digital information is available in English, but a significantly less amount of information is available in other languages, something that poses a problem for social inclusion.
Despite English being the standard for programming languages, non-Western countries developed many widely used programming languages. Python, one of the most popular programming languages, was created in the Netherlands by Guido van Rossum in 1991. Additionally, in Japan, Ruby, a programming language mainly used for web development, was created by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in the mid-1990s. English was considered more appropriate for the international development community. Based on French keywords, Langage Symbolique d'Enseignement – Symbolic Language for Teaching (LSE) sprouted out of France for beginner programmers, and its failure is attributed to that lack of French knowledge globally. As a result, PASCAL was developed in English while germinating in Switzerland.
Influence on other languages The computing terminology of many languages borrows from English. Some language communities actively resist this trend, and in other cases English is used extensively and more directly. This section gives some examples of the use of English loans in other languages and mentions any notable differences.
Bulgarian Both English and Russian have had influence over Bulgarian computing vocabulary. In many cases, however, the borrowed word is translated into Bulgarian rather than transcribed phonetically from English. Combined with the use of Cyrillic this can make it difficult to recognize loanwords. For example, the Bulgarian term for motherboard is (), literally "bottom board".
() – computer () – hard disk (i.e., hard drive) () – floppy disk; like the French () – web site; but also (), literally "internet page"
Faroese The Faroese language has a sparse scientific vocabulary based on the language itself. Many Faroese scientific words are borrowed and/or modified versions of especially Nordic and English equivalents. The vocabulary is constantly evolving and thus new words often die out, and only a few survive and become widely used. Examples of successful words include e.g. "" (computer), "" (at sign) and "" (server).
French
In French, there are some generally accepted English loanwords, but there is also a distinct effort to avoid them. In France, the is responsible for the standardisation of the language and often coins new technological terms. Some of them are accepted in practice, but oftentimes the English loans remain predominant. In Quebec, the has a similar function.
/ (in Europe); (mainly in French-speaking Canada, but increasingly used in French-speaking Europe); (only used as an abbreviation, similar to """Questions de langue" on the Académie Française's website); more formally – spam , phishing – phishing – to download – website , – website hyper-link – database , , short – webcam , , – to boot , – to reboot , – to shut down , – bootable , , overclocking – overclocking – watercooling – case modding
German
In German, English words are very often used as well: nouns: , , , , verbs: , ,
Japanese
Japanese uses the katakana alphabet for foreign loanwords, a wide variety of which are in use today. English computing terms remain prevalent in modern Japanese vocabulary.
コンピューター () - computer コーダー () - coder コーデック () - codec ダウンロード () - download リンク () - link
Utilizing a keyboard layout suitable for romanization of Japanese, a user may type in the Latin script in order to display Japanese, inclusive of hiragana, katakana, and Japanese kanji.Usually when writing in Japanese on a computer keyboard, the text is input in roman transcription, optionally according to Hepburn, Kunrei, or Nippon romanization; the common Japanese word processing programs allow for all three. Long vowels are input according to how they are written in kana; for example, a long o is input as ou, instead of an o with a circumflex or macron (ô or ō). As letters are keyed in, they are automatically converted, as specified, into either hiragana or katakana. And these kana phrases are in turn converted, as desired, into kanji.
Icelandic The Icelandic language has its own vocabulary of scientific terms. Still, English loans exist, and are mostly used in casual conversation, whereas the Icelandic words might be longer or not as widespread.
Italian In Italian, most words related to computing are left in English, with few Italian native words being used, these latter ones usually relegated to describe the early versions of such products (as an example, computer is the go-to word in Italian, with calcolatore being used almost exclusively for punch-card computers) or may be avoided entirely if the metaphor does not translate easily (e.g. mouse; contrast with finestra being used to translate a window).
Norwegian It's quite common to use English words with regards to computing in all Scandinavian languages.
nouns: (referring to e-mail), , (from "blog"),
verbs: , ,
Polish Polish terminology derived from English: dżojstik: joystick kartrydż, kartridż: cartridge interfejs: interface mejl: e-mail
Russian History of computer hardware in Eastern Bloc countries Computer Russification
Spanish The English influence on the software industry and the internet in Latin America has borrowed significantly from the Castilian lexicon.
Frequently untranslated, and their Spanish equivalent email: mouse (only in Latin America): (mainly in Spain) messenger: (only in Spain) webcam: , website: , blog: , ban/banned: (Latin America), , web: ,
Not translated flog download
Undecided Many computing terms in Spanish share a common root with their English counterpart. In these cases, both terms are understood, but the Spanish is preferred for formal use: link vs or net vs
Character encoding Early computer software and hardware had very little support for character sets other than the Latin alphabet. As a result, it was difficult or impossible to represent languages based on other scripts. The ASCII character encoding, created in the 1960s, usually only supported 128 different characters in a 7 bit format. With the use of additional software it was possible to provide support for some languages, for instance those based on the Cyrillic alphabet. However, complex-script and logographic languages like Chinese or Japanese need more characters than the 256 limit imposed by 8-bit character encodings. Some computers created in the former USSR had native support for the Cyrillic alphabet.
The widespread adoption of Unicode, and UTF-8 on the web, resolved most of these historical limitations. ASCII remains the de facto standard for command interpreters, programming languages and text-based communication protocols, but it is slowly dying out.
Mojibake – Text presented as "unreadable" when software fails due to character encoding issues.
Programming language
The syntax of most programming languages uses English keywords, and therefore it could be argued some knowledge of English is required in order to use them. Some studies have shown that programmers nonnative to English self-report that English is their biggest obstacle to programming proficiency. However, it is important to recognize all programming languages are in the class of formal languages. They are very different from any natural language, including English.
Some examples of non-English programming languages:
Arabic: ARLOGO, قلب Bengali: BangaBhasha Chinese: Chinese BASIC Dutch: Superlogo French: LSE, WinDev, Pascal (although the English version is more widespread) Hebrew: Hebrew Programming Language Icelandic: Fjölnir Indian Languages: Hindawi Programming System Russian: Glagol Portuguese: Portugol
Communication protocols