legesher/language-canon
Legesher language canon What this Canon is A centralized standard, created and curated by language communities, for what programming concepts are called in each natural language. It holds language-specific renderings of programming keywords, builtins and exceptions, and documents where each language stands in that process. The language-canon builds on legesher/language-corpus, which gathers every rendering anyone has proposed. The corpus is the full record of… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/legesher/language-canon.
Legesher language canon
What this Canon is
A centralized standard, created and curated by language communities, for what programming concepts are called in each natural language.
It holds language-specific renderings of programming keywords, builtins and exceptions, and documents where each language stands in that process.
The language-canon builds on `legesher/language-corpus`, which gathers every rendering anyone has proposed. The corpus is the full record of what has been suggested; the canon is the vocabulary that downstream applications actually use.
Computer science as a global discipline is primarily based in English. A developer who does not read English memorizes shapes rather than reading words and connecting the terminology to related context. The hard part is not the obvious vocabulary. It is the gray areas, where words are borrowed, created, or derived from English (elif and lambda have no obvious answer in any language), and settling them takes people who know a language's culture and the stories woven into it, not only its grammar.
Note: This is a **growing dataset**. A rendering here is the current answer, not a final one, and each carries a rung recording how much review stands behind it.
Renderings are keyed by content-addressed uids (opt_ + 24 hex) shared with the corpus, so an option_uid resolves there to every alternative proposed for that concept and every endorsement attached to them.
Languages
All 51 languages in this export, with where each one stands on the maturity ladder. The primary-subtag rollup in the frontmatter is what the Hub indexes for search; this is the full list, script subtags and all.
Today: 36 at machine, 15 at experimental.
The locales config carries the same list with the counts behind each status, so you can sort and filter it rather than read it.
The maturity ladder
Without other global examples to build from, each language's canon starts drafted from machines and prior art. From there native speakers move it up: experimental, then reviewed, then official. Once a language reaches official, its canon becomes a resource for the community it exists to serve.
The rung belongs to the language. Each rendering carries its own so the label stays auditable, but what you should read is the language's status: a language is experimental while it is in progress, and reviewed or official only once every one of its words has got there.
machine
Drafted, not decided. The vocabulary came from a machine draft or from prior art, and nobody has weighed in on any of it yet.
It is not arbitrary. Every rendering clears mechanical checks before it can be selected: it has to be a valid identifier in its language, stable under the Unicode normalization the interpreter applies, and free of collisions with other terms in its vocabulary. What nobody has asked is whether it is the right word — whether a programmer who speaks the language would recognise it.
Treat the whole vocabulary as a proposal.
experimental
Review has begun. At least one word has been chosen or endorsed by a person — a maintainer curating a batch, a native speaker correcting a term, or a contributor putting their name behind a rendering someone else proposed.
Most of the endorsements here predate this dataset: they are the review history of the community that built Legesher's original translations, where contributors voted on renderings word by word. An endorsement attaches to the specific option that was later selected, so it is evidence about this word, not about the concept in general.
A language stays here for as long as the work is under way, however far along it is. The locales config carries the counts if you want to know how far.
reviewed
Every word has been signed off by several native speakers, so the vocabulary reflects agreement rather than one person's preference.
The risk with a single reviewer is not that they are wrong. It is that they are unrepresentative — a regional form, a register that reads formal or childish elsewhere, a loanword one community has absorbed and another rejects. More than one voice is what makes a vocabulary a shared answer.
How many voices, and how varied, is still being defined. We would rather say so than publish a threshold we have not set.
official
Ratified in a convened session, and screened.
Screening is separate from accuracy. A rendering can be a correct translation and still be the wrong word to ship: offensive in another register, unfortunate beside a neighbouring term, or colliding with something it should not. A status of official means both questions were asked of the whole vocabulary and answered by people with standing to answer them.
A language community makes this decision, not a threshold.
Where things stand today
36 at machine, 15 at experimental.
Review has begun in 15 languages, covering 505 of 9,375 renderings. No language has reached reviewed: that needs every word signed off by more than one native speaker, and the threshold for how many voices is still being defined.
We publish at this stage deliberately. A terminology set developed privately and released once it is "ready" has already made every decision without the people it is for. Publishing early makes the current state visible, citable and arguable, while it is still genuinely open.
A language's status here describes its canon. It is not the same as the tier of the language pack that ships from it.
Configs
Two, joined on locale.
`canon` — one row per decision.
identity_ok marks a deliberate cognate or loanword — stopiteration in Danish, Lambda in German. It does not mean "not translated yet"; without it a reader could not tell a considered borrowing from an oversight.
`locales` — one row per language: locale, language_name, native_name, rtl, decisions, a count at each rung, and native_reviewed. Language attributes live only here, so a language is described in exactly one place.
Who decides, and how to take part
decided_by records the role that made a selection, never the person: automated for migrations and batch jobs, maintainer for curation, native-reviewer for a speaker of the language. Contributor identities are not published in this dataset. Endorsements, attribution and withdrawal are handled through `legesher/language-corpus`, which is the artifact that carries them.
The role answers a different question from the rung, and the two are deliberately independent: status says how much review stands behind a rendering, decided_by says who made the most recent call. A single native reviewer is visible here without moving the rung, because their judgement is real and is not yet a consensus.
This requires collaboration from people who do not just speak a language other than English, but know its culture. If that is you, corrections, endorsements and objections all move a rendering up the ladder, and disagreement is a contribution rather than an obstacle.
Licence and citation
Released under Apache-2.0. Legesher holds the compilation right in this dataset and licenses it on those terms; the individual renderings arrive from the corpus, whose own licence and attribution notices govern the contributed parts.
@misc{legesher_language_canon,
title = {Legesher Language Canon},
author = {Legesher},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/legesher/language-canon}}
}