Read and write real code in your own language.
100 of the world's most-used programming languages, in 150 of the largest human languages.
Software is written using English words, a language most people do not speak. NADA displays your code in your own language. This allows you to read, write and think more naturally.
Your language, your code. Nothing in between.
The register
Where the work stands today.
We start each language from English, then keep adding to it until it covers the words used in code. 79 languages already cover more than 70 percent.
Usable in 130+ languages today. Figures as of June 2026.
Theory of change
Code is global. Its language is not.
Roughly five in six people do not read English well — the language almost all code is written in. That locks most of the world out of reading, learning from, and writing real working code.
When you can read the code, you can learn from it. When you can learn from it, you can write it.
def greet(name):
if name:
return f"Hello, {name}"परिभाषा greet(name):
अगर name:
वापसी f"Hello, {name}"AI safety
A human immune system for code written by AI.
Millions of people now ask AI to write code for them, and the number is rising fast. Many of them are writing code for the first time, and they cannot read what the AI made. This is a real risk. When no person understands the code, mistakes, safety problems, and bugs go out to real users. NADA is like an immune system for code: when the code appears in a person’s own language, they can finally read it, check it, and find the problems before they cause harm. The more code people make that they cannot read, the more this matters.
“I could not read it, it was in a foreign language” is no longer a reason to skip the check.
How it stays open
Built so no company can own it.
The result: a public standard that no single company controls — like Unicode, the W3C, and the IETF.
Built to be a digital public good: open data, open tools, works anywhere. This is our aim, not an official certificate.
For governments, ministries, and industry
Adopt NADA, and it multiplies.
Bring code into your people's language and the effects compound — across safety, skills, output, and growth.
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A security multiplier.
When a workforce can read the code that AI now writes for it, far more human eyes catch what the machines produce. NADA hands auditability back to the people who were locked out of it.
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A literacy multiplier.
The barrier to learning to program was never the logic — it was forty English keywords at the door. Remove it, and people can begin in the language they already think in.
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A productivity multiplier.
Developers who read and write in their own language understand code faster, trust it more, and ship with fewer misunderstandings.
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An economy multiplier.
Programming is the most economically consequential skill of our era. Open it to the majority of the planet that English kept out, and you create talent, teachers, and growth where there was a closed door.
For ministries of education & culture
A language survives by being used — including in code.
UNESCO judges a language's vitality partly by whether it reaches new domains. Yet of the world's roughly 7,000 languages, fewer than 100 are used in the digital world. Programming — the highest-status, most economically valuable modern skill — is almost entirely gated behind English. That exclusion has become a leading driver of language decline.
of the world's ~7,000 languages are endangered — roughly one lost every two weeks.
UNESCOlanguages are used in the digital world.
United Nationsof learners can't access education in a language they understand (up to 90% in some countries).
UNESCO GEM Reportmore likely to read with understanding when taught in a language they speak.
UNESCOWhat NADA changes
NADA does not ask a community to invent a script or fork the world's software. It lets people read and write real, runnable code in their own language, live in the editor, while the file on disk stays canonical English — so it still runs everywhere and a student's work stays portable. A national or heritage language gains a genuine foothold in the prestige domain of computing, at near-zero infrastructure cost.
There is a trusted precedent. Unicode — a non-profit open standard now running on more than 20 billion devices — made the world's scripts representable. NADA is the next layer: making the act of programming itself accessible. And coordinated public standards bodies have helped languages recover before — te reo Māori, ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, Cymraeg, Euskara. NADA is the analogous standard for the vocabulary of code.
Three steps — no new policy required
- Recognise NADA localization of your national or heritage language as a digital-empowerment deliverable under your International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032) national action plan.
- Co-fund a community-led translation of the programming vocabulary into your language, stewarded through the neutral non-profit Foundation.
- Pilot it in your national digital-skills curriculum, as mother-tongue instruction.
NADA is one open, neutral instrument — not a cure. Language survival takes immersion, transmission, and institutions, and a community's own decision to lead. What NADA removes is one specific, costly barrier: it puts a language where serious technical work is done.
Start a conversation with the foundationGovernments and education
Let us build this with you.
We are a non-profit foundation, and we want to work with you. NADA is a new way for anyone to begin to read and write code, including the people who serve the public. Many workforces already use AI to write code they cannot read; NADA lets them read it, which makes that work far safer. We want to collaborate with you, not sell you a product.
- We open a new way to learn technical skills for everyone, including public-sector workers and students.
- We help your workforce read and check the AI code they now make every day.
- We can build your country’s own school courses right into the NADA app.
- For the first time, your courses can come with AI help in your own local language.
- For ministries of education and culture, NADA is also a tool of language revitalization and preservation — giving your language new standing, new teaching materials, and new economic reason to thrive in the most modern technical domain.
- We are looking for the best language experts and advisors in every language to help us get each one right.
The ask
We are looking for funders who back lasting public goods, not products.
Donations keep this work free and growing: bringing more languages to full coverage, keeping the tools open, and keeping the standard free and independent of any company. For example — fully funding one regional language brings several more online at once.
We are asking for a conversation, not a number.
hello@nadalang.org · governance memo on request.
Stay informed
Follow the foundation’s work.
Occasional updates on the language data, native-speaker review, and how governments and schools can take part.