Ethereum

The seed phrase is an integral part of the crypto world and crucial for your fund's safety! But how much do you know about seed phrases?

Did you know that BIP 39 offers wordlists in languages other than English for seed phrases?

Ethereum Segment Lead at everstake.one | ETH Staking

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP 39) provides a list of 2048 words for #Bitcoin wallets to pick a seed phrase. Other crypto wallets also use this list. Interestingly, this list ensures that no identical words start with the same four letters.

BIP 39 specifies the number of word lists besides English, but it's generally advised against using them. 
Words can be ambiguous between languages, and many use encodings that are not guaranteed to be consistent or supported on every system.

Popular wallets primarily offer recovery seed phrases in English, which can pose challenges for non-English speakers. 
This adds complexity to an already unfamiliar process for many non-technical users. 

While it's important to remove barriers, we must balance this with security and potential inconvenience.

An interesting discussion has emerged on this topic.
For instance, a Spanish-speaking user highlighted that special characters in Spanish (like ñ and tildes: á, é, í, ó, ú) could complicate seed word recovery, but BIP 39 says that characters like 'ñ,' 'ü,' 'á,' etc., are considered equal to 'n,' 'u,' 'a, etc.

One more user shared his experience of using seed phrases in Japanese. He generated a seed phrase in Japanese in the BRD wallet and used it for a long time, but when he tried importing his wallet into Metamask, it was impossible.

One more user shared his experience of using seed phrases in Japanese. He generated a seed phrase in Japanese in the BRD wallet and used it for a long time, but when he tried importing his wallet into Metamask, it was impossible.

https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension/issues/4837#issuecomment-1121764175

Anyway that’s an pleasant experience to be able to use your preferred language in crypto.

With increasing demand for different languages, embracing multilingual options could become the norm, enhancing accessibility and inclusivity in the crypto space. However, the technical side needs a lot of work.

Share in the comments if this fact surprised you, as it was for me during the last @ethdotorg office hours on mnemonic, seed phrases and public-private keys 😀

BIP 39 has wordlists in Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Chinese, French, Italian, Czech, and Portuguese that can be used as seed phrases.