BIP39 word list languages importance

[Oshosondy]

I recently checked the BIP39 on GitHub not long ago, I saw the mnemonic words now in 9 languages while Chinese simplified and traditional make it 10. I am from a country that English is the official language, all the wallet I have downloaded before are all in English, I have used three wallets at list now.

What I do expect after seeing mnemonic (seed phrase) in different languages on GitHub, I was thinking if a new downloaded wallet wants to generate seed phrase, there should be an option of language selection so that we can choose any of the language of our choice but English is what I have been seeing, I have never seen a wallet that comes with another language before than English.

Is there anything I am missing?
Is there a wallet the seed phrase is written in other languages?
Is there a wallet that give us the option to manually choose the language we want?

I think it will be a great implementation if wallets have the option for people to select the language of choice.

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

If people want to join crypto, they should know English, at basic level.

I think the word list and language options can be expanded. ASCII code can be a problem for the development and as said, English should be know basically. When you use non-custodial wallet as Electrum and read its documents or tutorials from community, English is necessary.

The seed uses very common English words. With Google, people can understand seed words' meanings.

If they recover wallet from seeds, Electrum will give them list of words to choose when they type the first character.
If you type h character, you will be given list of
habit
hair
half
hallway
...

[Upgrade00]

If people want to join crypto, they should know English, at basic level.

This is quite restrictive and I do not think one needs basic knowledge of English to join crypto, white papers have been translated to multiple languages, there are informative videos and articles also in multiple languages and on the topic of seed phrases, one does not need to have knowledge of the meaning of the words to use a see phrase, they are sometimes called mnemonics but are definitely not meant to be memorized, ony written down, anyone can copy down a bunch of grouped letters.

Is there anything I am missing?

I assume there is a security risk to using different languages to make up the seed phrase reason why it has not been widely adopted.

[Darker45]

If people want to join crypto, they should know English, at basic level.

This is quite restrictive and I do not think one needs basic knowledge of English to join crypto, white papers have been translated to multiple languages, there are informative videos and articles also in multiple languages and on the topic of seed phrases, one does not need to have knowledge of the meaning of the words to use a see phrase, they are sometimes called mnemonics but are definitely not meant to be memorized, ony written down, anyone can copy down a bunch of grouped letters.

Bitcoin somehow thrived in Japan, China, South Korea, and other countries where the English language is very weak. The language is not only different but is also using totally different characters and rules. But even so, I guess it would be enough that you have a gadget that supports Roman alphanumeric characters. It may be a little hard to use English-only wallets, but still fairly manageable I suppose.

[DdmrDdmr]

I’ve tried to find a list of wallets that support generating and entering mnemonics in different languages, but came out empty handed. Some seem to be a hard no (Ledger for example), and there are one or two I’ve seen that seem to support it (Copay for example). The fact that it doesn’t seem that widespread should probably be something to ponder if one is considering using a different language, especially considering that one may want to migrate the type of wallet somewhere down the road.

[NotATether]

I have never seen a wallet that comes with another language before than English.

It has something to do with BIP39 being deprecated (UNANIMOUSLY_DISCOURAGE_FOR_IMPLEMENTATION) for lack of version bits inside the mnemonic, so that if improvements to the standard want to be made there's going to be more than one format of BIP39 mnemonic and then you'll have different software supporting different formats because there's no version that indicates which is "newer".

[o_e_l_e_o]

There is no reason you can't convert your seed phrase in to your own language if you want. Each word simply encodes 11 bits of data. The 594th word on the English word list (for example) encodes the same 11 bits of data as the 594th word on the Spanish, Japanese, French, etc., word list. Just as long as you are careful not to make a mistake and double check all your conversions, you should be fine. If your wallet doesn't accept your chosen word list, then you would need to convert back if you ever need to import or restore from your seed phrase, when considering BIP39 seed phrases.

With Electrum you can use any word list you like, so if you wanted to use one of the non-English BIP39 word lists you can. You can also use any word list you like in your own language, but of course bearing in mind that the seed phrase generated will not be a BIP39 seed phrase. Simply replace the word list in the electrum/electrum/wordlist folder with your chosen word list. The upside to this is you can recover your Electrum seed phrase in Electrum with no knowledge of the word list which was used to generate it.

[Lucius]

This is quite restrictive and I do not think one needs basic knowledge of English to join crypto...

In some countries, there are very few sources of information on cryptocurrencies in the local language, so it may be crucial to understand English at least at a basic level. When I started with crypto I found more than 90% of useful information in English, and even today I can't get real information in my local language because people who should know something about it mostly do bad copy/paste of foreign articles without they understand the subject at all.

I have a few friends who have taken a serious interest in crypto lately, but they themselves admit that their poor knowledge of English is a serious problem when looking for some information online. Just look at this forum, those who do not know the basics of the English language can participate only in their local board.

[pooya87]

Electrum already contains word lists in 5 languages: English, Chinese simplified, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. You can find the word lists here: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/tree/master/electrum/wordlist
But you'd have to manually change the wordlist as the developers say they won't allow non-English wordlists by default and here is the reason why: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/6860

[ranochigo]

It has something to do with BIP39 being deprecated (UNANIMOUSLY_DISCOURAGE_FOR_IMPLEMENTATION) for lack of version bits inside the mnemonic, so that if improvements to the standard want to be made there's going to be more than one format of BIP39 mnemonic and then you'll have different software supporting different formats because there's no version that indicates which is "newer".

The way BIP39 works is that it relies on a set of word list for the checksum. Newer Electrum seeds are not interchangable with BIP39 seeds due to the checksums being incompatible. If you need to change the standard, then that is a way to go. It is not in the process of being deprecated, I haven't seen any other mnemonic system other than Electrum being used here.

Adding additional language support, other than the mentioned limitation requires the developer implementing more wordlist and computation for the checksum. There is just no point adding so many languages, especially with the given limitation.