The Wikipedia has an (incomplete) list of non-English based programming languages, that were created at some time. What these languages try to do is make sure young children or other people who did not master the English Alphabet and vocabulary well can start learning programming without knowing English first.
I see several problems with this approach. One is that it is important that children will be taught English starting from an early age - as early as possible. This is because English, being the international language, is becoming more and more important for every one to learn. Tender children who are talked to in several languages, will quickly master them, without confusing them. This will save them a lot of frustration later. (By all means if one happens to know other languages, he should talk to his children using them too, but that is beside the main point.)
Knowledge of English is more important than knowing how to program. So it is a good idea that when teaching programming to teach English first as a necessary pre-requisite.
The other problem I see is that such localised programming languages feel unnatural and wrong. English has the richest technical vocabulary of any other language, and some terms in English are impossible to translate to other languages. And yet another is that such languages tend to be very ad-hoc and incomplete. Finally, code that is written in them cannot be understood by programmers who don’t know this language.
So, to sum up, instead of starting with a localised programming language, teach your students some basic English first. It might take longer, but will save more time and frustration later on. Plus, programming is a great way to expand one’s mastery of English, especially today when the Internet is so prevalent.[globalisation]
[globalisation] A few people who read this article claimed I was advocating globalisation. However, consider what Eric Raymond writes in “How to Become a Hacker”:
4. If you don’t have functional English, learn it.
As an American and native English-speaker myself, I have previously been reluctant to suggest this, lest it be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism. But several native speakers of other languages have urged me to point out that English is the working language of the hacker culture and the Internet, and that you will need to know it to function in the hacker community.
One should note that the proliferation of English today is not the first time that there happened to be a Lingua franca in the world or a limited part of it. I also feel that having one spoken language that everyone of importance is familiar with (although possibly not so well) is better than not having any good common way of communication, and thus was shown to be inevitable times and again in history.