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In theory, you can make a programming language out of any symbols. The computer doesn't care.
The computer is already running an invisible program (a compiler) to translate your IF or <body> into the 1s and 0s that it functions in, and it would function just as effectively if we used a potato emoji to stand for IF and the obscure 15th century Cyrillic symbol multiocular O to stand for <body>. The fact that programming languages often resemble English words like body or if is a convenient accommodation for our puny human meatbrains, which are much better at remembering commands that look like words we already know.
But only some of us already know the words of these commands: those of us who speak English. The "initial promise of the web" was only ever a promise to its English-speaking users, whether native English-speaking or with access to the kind of elite education that produces fluent second-language English speakers in non-English-dominant areas.
It’s true that software programs and social media platforms are now often available in some 30 to 100 languages—but what about the tools that make us creators, not just consumers, of computational tools? I'm not even asking whether we should make programming languages in small, underserved languages (although that would be cool). Even huge languages that have extensive literary traditions and are used as regional trade languages, like Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, and Arabic, still aren't widespread as languages of code.
We know that Latin's dominance in writing ended. The technology of writing spread to other languages. The technology of coding is no more intrinsically bound to English than the technology of writing was bound to Latin. I propose we start by adjusting the way we talk about programming languages when they contain words from human languages. The first website wasn't written in HTML—it was written in English HTML. The snippet of code that appears along the bottom of Glitch's reproduction? It's not in JavaScript, it's in English JavaScript. When we name the English default, it becomes more obvious that we can question it—we can start imagining a world that also contains Russian HTML or Swahili JavaScript, where you don't have an unearned advantage in learning to code if your native language happens to be English.
This world doesn't exist yet. Perhaps in the next 30 years, we'll make it.
https://hackaday.com/2019/07/30/c20-is-feature-complete-heres-what-changes-are-coming/