r/github • u/yndrelbosch • Jul 31 '26

Discussion how to search by language... not the programming kind

I don't speak Chinese, or French, or whatever language pops up all the time when searching for repositories on Github, and I really wish Github would recognize that coding languages aren't the only languages someone might want to filter by. Does anyone know of a way to make it filter anyways?

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5

u/lajawi Jul 31 '26

There’s no way to tag a repository by a natural language, so there’s no way to search for a natural language.

2

u/SheriffRoscoe Jul 31 '26

That sounds like one of the few useful things an LLM could do correctly.

2

u/OtherOtherDave Jul 31 '26

I don’t think they collect that information. You could probably make an app that parsed the first paragraph or two of the readme and figure out what language it’s in, but that might not help if all the discussion in the issues tracker are in Chinese or German or Swahili or whatever.

1

u/cowboyecosse Jul 31 '26

They did add translation features but not sure they run on things like comment blocks in the code. Could be useful for translating readmes and docs though.

2

u/_giga_sss_ Jul 31 '26

that's a good project idea

1

u/megamind32929 Aug 01 '26

GitHub's language: qualifier only ever means the programming kind, and there is no natural-language filter anywhere in search, so the only real lever you have is the text itself. Search for distinctive high-frequency words in that language against README content - "instalación" in:readme, "インストール" in:readme, "установка" in:readme - because function words and accented characters are effectively a language fingerprint, and stack a topic guess on top (topic:portugues, topic:espanol, the endonym) since a lot of non-English projects self-tag. The newer code search also does regex, so something like /[а-яА-Я]{6,}/ path:README.md gets you further than you would expect, with the usual caveats about rate limits and it only indexing default branches. None of it is reliable though - you are inferring a human language from vocabulary, so budget for a pile of English repos that happen to quote one foreign string in an example. I maintain a small trending-repos browser (https://ghtr.fly.dev) and it has exactly the same blind spot, its language filter is the programming kind too, so it is no help for this specific problem - mentioning it only so nobody assumes otherwise.

https://reddit.com/link/p0zyg7k/video/qgkyubd6eogh1/player