Hi everyone,
I wanted to share an open-source contribution for BIP39 recovery UX:
https://github.com/osem23/bip39-wordlists-tzurThis is not a new seed standard, not a wallet promotion, and not a replacement for the existing BIP39 wordlists.
The goal is to make BIP39 recovery more accessible to users who are not comfortable with English.
Many Bitcoin users around the world still have to write down and recover seed phrases in English, even when they do not understand English well.
For English speakers, seed words are familiar words.
For many non-English users, they can feel like random foreign symbols that must be copied perfectly.
This project provides native-language display and input wordlists for BIP39 recovery UX.
Important clarification:
The canonical BIP39 seed flow remains unchanged.
The English BIP39 mnemonic remains the source of truth.
PBKDF2 still runs on the canonical BIP39 form.
The native-language words are an optional display/input layer, not a new cryptographic scheme.
The repo includes wordlists and mappings for additional languages, with the goal of making recovery easier to understand for users who are not comfortable with English.
I understand that the original BIP39 wordlists were not simple direct translations. They were designed with important constraints such as avoiding confusing words, avoiding multiple spellings, avoiding similar-sounding words, and supporting short-prefix identification where possible.
Feedback is very welcome, especially around:
Are native-language display/input layers useful for wallet recovery UX?
What risks does this approach create?
Should something like this stay outside BIP39 as a wallet-specific UX layer?
Are there languages where this approach is especially risky?
How should native-speaker review be handled?
Are there better ways to help non-English users recover safely without changing BIP39?
I would especially appreciate review from wallet developers, BIP39 implementers, and native speakers of the included languages.
GitHub:
https://github.com/osem23/bip39-wordlists-tzurThank you.
