Is English required on Stack Overflow?

The Stack Overflow Trilogy has an official policy on non-English questions:

It is not, nor has it ever been, our goal to be the one place in the world for all programming information in every possible human language.

• Direct question posters to native language resources.
• It is not the community's goal to teach English.
• The question asker should put some effort into the question.

As long as the question is in salvageable English and makes some modicum of sense, it should be edited and improved like any other post.

Languages by total number of speakers

English is as close that we have ever come to a global lingua-franca. It is generally considered the dominant language of science and diplomacy. It is also the most taught second-language by a far, far margin. English is the official language of about 45 nations.

English is everywhere. Some 380 million people speak it as their first language and another 600 million speak it as their second. A billion are learning it, about a third of the world's population is in some sense exposed to it and by 2030, it is predicted almost half of the world will be more or less proficient in it. It is the language of globalization - of international business, politics and diplomacy. It is the language of computers and the Internet. You'll see it on posters in Beijing, you'll hear it in pop songs in Tokyo, you'll read it in official documents in Prague. Deutsche Welle broadcasts in it. Bjork, an Icelander, sings in it. French business schools teach in it. It is the medium of expression in cabinet meetings in Bolivia. English is now the global language. - Oxford Seminars

As Troy pointed out in the comments, the number of people who speak English is nowhere near as important as how many people can write it. More specifically, I find the number of people who use their written language on the Internet to be the single most telling piece of information. The #1 language of the Internet is English, by a wide margin. In the chart below you can see that it is almost three times as prolific as the next language.

Global Internet Usage
Language - Number of users (millions)

English - 295.2
Chinese - 110.0
Spanish - 86.0

Forgetting any ethics of why or how this came about, I think it is an important step forward. It was suggested in the earlier days of SO that we have en.stackoverflow.com, fr.stackoverflow.com, etc, etc.. and I'm glad this was decided against. Rather than fractionate our small community we can try and bring it together.

Finally, most programming languages are based in English. Their keywords, APIs, and documentation are mostly taken from English words. The number of mainstream languages that have foreign language equivalents are few and far between. With our languages already based in English, I think it makes sense to continue expanding our knowledge repository without dividing it into various inaccessible fractions.

I spend most of my time on Stackoverflow editing and refining questions of non-native speakers and I consider this my largest contribution to the site.. even though I don't get rep for it.

I say keep it in English. I'm not against diversity or other languages, I'm for us all being able to communicate under one. This isn't political, this isn't about smothering peoples cultures with Western ideologies. It is about being pragmatic.

I feel that many people who don't speak other language than English don't want to appear ignorant so they approve multi-bilingual site but that's wrong.

I'm not native English speaker...

...but I really like the fact that IT world is mostly standardized on a single language. It makes it easier to share knowledge, experience and research. Why fragment all this into multiple languages again?

From the "About" page:

We don't run Stack Overflow. You do. Stack Overflow is collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow programmers. Once the system learns to trust you, you'll be able to edit anything, much like Wikipedia. With your help, we can build good answers to every imaginable programming question together. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home -- better programming is our goal.

From that, I would say yes, post your multi-lingual questions, but since the community seems to be mostly english-speaking you may not get a lot of answers.

This question crops up in many fora, like IRC, Usenet, web discussion boards, and now also Stack Overflow.

The main problem isn't that there aren't people on these fora that speak in other languages. There are of course.

The main problem is twofold:

1. People having some kind of (incorrect) sense of what is appropriate on the forum
2. How to reach as many eyeballs as possible

Especially on IRC you'll find occurrences of the first, where people will just complain that you should write in English or take a hike.

The second problem is more of a real problem. If you ask a C# question in Spanish, I can't read it, so I can't answer it, even if I want to.

If you want to reach as many eyeballs as possible, you should try to use the language that will help you reach that goal. If that means writing bad English, so be it. It's better to be upfront about that problem than to just use a native language. Stack Overflow is a system which allows people to edit, so if you use bad English, perhaps someone will help you fix it.

On the other hand, if you simply can't formulate the question in English, ask it in your native tongue, but then be prepared to accept that fewer people will read the question and be able to answer. If that is fine, why shouldn't Stack Overflow accept it? Perhaps you could even add a statement that if anyone wants to add an English translation, you'd be fine with that.

Stack Overflow needs to be a place for everyone.

It's not required, but most of the users are English speaking. If you post your question in another language, maybe you should tag it with that language so that it will be easy to find for other speakers of that language.

Stackoverflow 没有很多人会说中文。所以呢，你的问题只会有很少的回复。

Harms articulates this well. Turns out English is the trade language of our era, not because it's qualitatively better than any other language, maybe just by chance - but if we agree to speak the same language in this context we'll get a lot more work done.

Auf Stack-Overflow hat sich Englisch eingebürgert, weil Jeff und Joel halt aus den USA kommen, das ganze auf Englisch aufgezogen haben und natürlich die englischsprachige Community angezogen haben. Es gibt keinen Sprachfilter, wenn jetzt also jemand auf chinesisch, indisch oder deutsch schreibt, dann verursacht das hier natürlich eine etwas unaufgeräumte Startseite, auf der man nur die Hälfte versteht, wenn man Glück hat. Sprachfilter wären evtl. eine Möglichkeit, aber ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob ich die zersplitterte Stack-Overflow-Community bevorzugen würde, oder ob man den Leuten, die partout kein Englisch sprechen können, nicht eher empfehlen sollte, auf lokale Seiten auszuweichen - nicht aus Arroganz, sondern weil ich glaube, daß lokale Communities einfach größer sind.

And for all the people who just went "WTF?", here is the summary in English: Stack Overflow was started in English - Joel and Jeff are Americans with English blogs, and they attracted the English-speaking community at first. I am not sure if I like foreign questions, because it clutters up the start page with stuff I simply cannot understand (hence I've written in German first to give an impression that localized content really make the experience worse for people that don't speak the language). I do not believe that a language filter is a good option (as it could cause multiple splits in the Stack Overflow community). So I think that people who really don't speak English are better off on local community sites - not because I am arrogant, but because I believe that they have a larger audience on a local community.

As was indicated only yesterday in a thread on language used in programming, the large majority of programming happens using English, even among the programmers who have a shared native language that isn't English. Programming languages that do not use English for keywords and API-defined terms are almost automatically regarded as "esoteric". Programming has developed in a cultural context that has given it the same connection to English that classical music has to Italian and gastronomy and old-style diplomacy has to French. So there is a sort of implicit understanding in the community that programming forums like Stack Overflow should be in English. And I'm a non-native English speaker saying that.

As for language variants of Stack Overflow, that would, as someone else pointed out, simply fragment the site's community and prevent the efficient dissemination of information among us programmers.

If you want to speak something other than English, you will have to wait until your language is available. The alternate language proposals can be found in Area 51. You can Follow their progress, or Commit to participate.

Stack Overflow in other languages

• Azeri
• German
• French
• Hindi
• Italian
• Korean
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Turkish
• Chinese

Super User, Server Fault or similar topics in other languages

• French: Ubuntu

English is the primary technology language in which most programming languages and APIs are written. If you want to be programmer I think you need to learn it anyway and asking question is another opportunity to think about it for a while.

I'm against a multi-language Stack Overflow. It will probably cause many interesting questions being answered and asked only in one of the languages and smaller audience will benefit from it. Another argument is that it will make search functionality very limited - Chinese pages will be practically unaccessible for non-Chinese folks.

Programmers are intelligent creatures and we all know some English. It's just a job requirement. Why not invest some time to learn it a bit better? Nowadays we have online translators and dictionaries, and it really isn't that hard to translate a question knowing some basics. If you make a language mistake, somebody will correct you and you will learn from this.

As you probably know after reading this text, English is not my first language.

This is an issue that faces a lot of popular websites. I think SO should be English-preferred. When a non-English question is asked, perhaps someone can provide an English translation. Even the Google translator is a start.

English dominates, not just in programming, but in most scientific and commercial endeavors.

Regardless of the underlying reason, it's common, expected, and will most likely persist for a very very long time.

My native language is Spanish and I don't mind at all that SO is in English. In fact, I think it is better that way, you know why? Sometimes I can't even translate IT and Computer Science terminology or concepts correctly from English to Spanish. That's why there are a lot of technology related anglicisms in Spanish (haha that's for the purists!) Otherwise, SO would literally become "spaghetti code" in terms of languages.

Any social community seems to settle on a single language, or conversly, any group with more than one language seems to fracture. I have given up on Orkut, for instance, as it became a Brazilian site. Given the target audience, the first language for SO is English, and adding other languages might even be harmful.

Post a non-English question and find out. The best way to discover if there are enough non-English speakers here is to start posting non-English questions and see if they get answers.

It might be good to use one of the tags to indicate the language (deutsch, francais, etc.), so that people can easily find questions in their preferred language.

What I would ideally like to see is some kind of integration of a translation service (google maybe, but I have no idea how accurate it is) and the ability to view any question in any language.

Then the original questionor could post in their native tongue and the browsing user could read in the language of their choosing.

Maybe a bit pie in the sky, I have no idea how accurate these online translations are.

I think it was hard to decide on Esperanto or Lojban. So they chose English instead.

As it stands now, I think questions/answers should be posted in English. My preferred way to handle non-English speakers in SO would be to expand to region- or country-specific sites that have different default languages. It's hard enough to navigate through the existing, large pool of questions without having to wade through questions in other languages. I would imagine this to be equally true of English-language questions for a non-English speaker in a hybrid language site.

It is not SO that imposes the English as the main language for developers. All languages, methods, hardware and software I know are better and more extensively documented and supported using English. If don't know English, you will have a worse support and documentation.

By the way, my native language is Portuguese.

At the moment most content here is English, but you can go to stackoverflow.uservoice.com and request some kind of i18n.

I've got it! Why don't we make up a language that's easy to learn and use. Pretty soon, it'll be the international standard!.... I'm guessing in a year or two after its invention!!! I mean how could it not?

I think the wiki format is an ideal solution to the multi-language problem. I don't see why a person couldn't ask a non-English question with the hope that someone else will add a translation to the post later on. The incentive for asking in English is to speed up the process.

See also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/116318/how-to-ask-something-specific-to-a-region-in-stackoverflow.

I'm sure that someone in many non-English countries will create their own version of Stack Overflow in their own language. Then the "market" i.e. users will decide what they like. You can even start your own exact clone without writing any code for $129/month at http://stackexchange.com/.

So Stack Overflow doesn't need to do it for it to happen. If something like this is going to happen, it's better if independent people do it - that way they have to build their own credibility. Which amounts to: keep Stack Overflow English.

Indeed, the fact that Stack Overflow is monolingual is a big limitation. It seems to be on purpose, according to the original announce (see the despising remark about answers in Japanese).

On the other hand, I cannot find a good way to mix languages in Stack Overflow without raising a lot of usability problems.

The best solution would be to have a clone of Stack Overflow per language (or, more specifically, per RFC 4646 language tag). Wikipedia works more or less that way. The minor problem would be that multilingual people would have different reputations on each site.

At least Simple English (by wikipedia's standards) should be required on top of the relevant technical lingo (like this), bearing in mind that higher standards of English is always desirable for communicating more complex ideas in an efficient manner.