I have often wondered why it is that non-English speaking programmers are forced to use a different language when programming when it would seem to be so easy to offer an ID
The Brazilians who created Lua used English keywords like if and while. The French who worked on ML also used English keywords. Stroustrup, Guido and Linus all come from non-English countries (although I believe they all learned English at a young age). And you can't forget Matz's work on Ruby.
I don't want to be snobbish, but English is the closest thing programmers have to a Lingua Franca.