Do I write in English or in my native language?

When I ask people why they do not write in their native language, an often used argument is that they can express themselves better in English and that it sounds so much better in English. A larger audience is sometimes also mentioned as a motivation.

Besides those arguments, I also see great tool support for the English language and less for other languages. Most advanced grammar and spelling tools support English. More bluntly, many of them only support English. Think of Grammarly, ProWritingAid etc. I think LanguageTool is currently the only one to support multiple languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, Chinese and others. And many online writing apps only provide an English User Interface and expect scenes and chapters to be written in English. This, by the way, is where digital-ink.app is taking another route: it has a multilingual User Interface, currently supporting English and Dutch and other translations can be added easily. It also makes no assumptions about which language a book is written in.

With language comes culture. Readers have expectations about names, locations, culture and so on that bring a story to life, when they pick up an English book. If you write fantasy on fictional worlds, there is little problem, because your readers expect you to shape the world according to your rules, but that’s different in other genres. Whether you locate your story in a big US city or in a small rural town, as a writer, you are expected to know the people, life, customs, habits and culture in those places. You can not simply project your knowledge about your hometown into the foreign locations in your story. And locating your story in a domestic town but write it in English may also feel strange, both for Anglo-Saxon readers and for readers in your country.

The reader will also have expectations about the style and language in the book. The richness of how characters, locations, emotions etc. are described are an important part of the satisfaction a reader gets from reading. And I think that many nonnative English writers overestimate their skills in the English language.

It may appear that I am making a point of writing in your native language. And from the perspective of "write the best story/novel that you can", I am. Because I think that you can only write to the best of your abilities, when you can express yourself best. And that is (usually) in your native language. It comes down to nuance, feeling, intuition maybe, when choosing your words. I think that is better developed in the language you have been raised with, and you have communicated in for most of your life.

And yes, the English reading audience is probably bigger than that of your native language. In 2025 there are for instance roughly 380 Million native English speakers and 1.5 billion English speakers when counting people who master English as their second language. The second-largest language is Mandarin Chinese with 1.2 billion speakers and on the third place it’s Hindi, with 609 million speakers.

1.5 billion potential readers is of course a lot more than you could have in other western languages such as French (312 million), German (125 million), Dutch (25 million) or even Spanish (558 million). But it also brings challenges to market your book abroad. And remember, more readers also means more writers. Especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, where I find writing, either for book, movie or play, to be more embedded in the culture than for instance in my country. So as a nonnative English writer, you can expect strong competition from native English writers. And you may think you have a better story, odds are that they have their story better written and better marketed.

The choice is yours, as always. But make it a well-considered decision. I hope this article will help you do so.