Technical English is nobody's mother tongue

The part of my brain that rage at injustice stirs like a slumbering dragon when I read the words “Native English”. As a speaker of English as a second language, I find native to be a rather inadequate, if lazy, choice as an attribute meant to describe linguistic proficiency. You’re born with eyes, but that doesn’t automatically make you a competent watcher; you acquire a language, but that doesn’t automatically turn you into a competent writer.

While it’s true that “native speaker” commonly refers to the first language one acquires as a human being, the same folks that ask for 10 years of experience in a 5-year old tech usually conflate first language with high proficiency when writing job ads. This is a gross mistake, and one that linguists have been debating for a while. Abby Bajuniemi, a cognitive linguist and researcher, elegantly summarized this when I first posted about this topic on LinkedIn:

The word “native” speaker is contentious these days among SLA scholars–more folks are moving to first language or something similar. Excluding people for whom a language is a second, third, etc. language just because it’s not their first language when they have high competency is silly. Linguists researching language acquisition think deeply […] about how we define levels of competency in any language.

The issue only gets worse when one stops and thinks about what flavour of English job ads are referring to. Having acquired English as a first language is sometimes not enough if one doesn’t speak the most prestigious among the 160 dialects of English. Are you from Lagos or Karachi? Tough luck: your English is not native enough. This highlights that accent discrimination exists and it’s a pretty big problem in the workplace.

Doing better than this is not that hard. Just replace native with expert or highly competent and check written samples instead of looking for the place of birth of candidates.

Technical English is a second language for pretty much everybody

Nobody grows up writing technical English or speaking Simplified Technical English with mum and dad. The language I use to write documentation is a subset of academic English with very few colloquial intrusions and a sprinkle of product-specific jargon that is treated as a foreign body. A solid command of vernacular English is obviously beneficial to my work – if only to ease communication with subject-matter experts, but I wouldn’t say it’s mandatory.

You’d argue that speakers of English as a second language (ESL) are free from the kind of idiomatic interference that first language speakers must keep in check. Technical English aims for clarity and precision, and ESL speakers focus on using the language as if it was code or music notation rather than the language you use every day with family and friends. We tend to write more deliberately and with greater awareness of potential ambiguities.

Like coders, technical writers are often proficient in more than one language. In my case, I speak four languages at what you’d call a native level of proficiency (English, Italian, Catalan, and Spanish). This linguistic diversity helps me navigate the complexities of global audiences and localization hurdles. It also helps me frame Technical English as what it is: a language that’s second for everybody, including speakers of English as a first language.

Communication skills matter more than the language you speak

Even before the advent of large language models (LLMs), I noticed something interesting about software development: the most skilled programmers are great at thinking about software design, application logic, and other systemic aspects of development. They think the choice of a language is but an implementation detail: they pick one or another to adapt to certain ecosystems or platforms, but they’d equally code using sticks if necessary.

Something similar is going to happen soon with technical writing: with AI-assisted writing, editing, and translation, your proficiency in a specific human language will matter less than your ability in building effective technical communication solutions. It was already like this, but the fact that the code editor I use at work, Cursor, can complete impeccably idiomatic sentences just by hitting the Tab key means that I don’t need to be Hemingway.

In technical documentation, language is a circumstance, an implementation detail. We use English because it’s the lingua franca of technology at the moment, and because most software is being produced, or innovated, in the Anglosphere. For all I know, the main language of tech comms could be Chinese, Hindi, or Indonesian in 2049. The democratization of English through LLMs and AI agents will only facilitate this sort of lateral movement.

The next tech revolution might come from Bangalore, Shenzhen, or São Paulo. The companies best positioned to understand, document, and build upon these innovations will be those with diverse technical writers who can bridge linguistic and cultural divides. In a world where LLMs handle the mechanical aspects of language production, the truly valuable skills become cross-cultural communication and technical comprehension. All else is campanilismo.