On a Tuesday morning, you’ll hear it before you see it if you stroll down Great Eastern Street. In the middle of a phone call, a product manager switches from English to fast-paced, clipped German. Outside a café, two engineers are arguing about flat whites in Spanish. At one of those long communal tables that every coworking space in Shoreditch seems to insist on, a recruiter is working through a French CV while wearing a headset. The glass-fronted offices surrounding the Old Street roundabout remain largely unchanged from five years ago, and the neighborhood continues to refer to itself as the center of London technology. However, the soundtrack has been altered.
Among these founders, there is a feeling that the previous regulations have quietly ceased to be effective. The pitch was straightforward for years: “build in English, sell in English, scale in English.” The rest of the world would adapt after London served as the starting point. That presumption is beginning to seem a bit out of date. According to a CSA Research survey that frequently appears in hiring decks, 40% of consumers won’t buy from a website that isn’t in their native tongue, and 76% of consumers prefer to make purchases in their own language. Such figures are read by founders, who then modify their job advertisements.
It is visible in the LinkedIn listings. A SaaS company that is expanding into the DACH area three blocks from Shoreditch High Street is now looking for a customer success manager who speaks German; technical skills are ranked second. A fintech company close to Spitalfields is looking for an account executive with “native or near-native Spanish, LATAM market experience preferred.” These are not jobs involving translation. These are front-line positions that were previously solely determined by your ability to close or build. Language is now at the top of the page.
Perhaps the change was inevitable. Theoretically, technology is global, but consumers are not. “We’ll just do English” is a polite way of saying “we’ll lose to a local competitor,” as a startup seeking its first hundred users in Munich soon learns. French, German, Spanish, Arabic, and Mandarin are the languages that employers consistently return to, according to Euro London Appointments, a company that has been placing bilingual candidates for years. This trend has been observed by recruiters throughout Europe.
The salary speaks for itself. According to 2024 LinkedIn data, tech workers who are proficient in a second language make between 10% and 15% more money than their monolingual peers. That is not insignificant. Learning a language is beginning to seem like an oddly antiquated kind of advantage in a market where engineers are continuously advised to specialize.
The hiring process is intriguing. It’s not just the major players. Bilingual hires are being placed alarmingly early by seed-stage businesses, the kind that operate out of a shared floor near Curtain Road and employ fifteen people. Before hiring a second backend developer, the founder of a developer-tools startup I spoke with last fall hired a French-speaking solutions engineer. “We kept losing French enterprise deals on the demo call,” he said, sounding almost ashamed. After saying “yes” in writing, they would become chilly. Something his architecture was unable to fix was resolved by a language hire.
Additionally, there is a cultural component that is more difficult to fit into a salary range. Employees who speak two languages typically interpret the room in different ways. They pick up on things that a translation tool would miss, like the half-joke in a sales meeting or the firm but courteous “we’ll think about it” that really means no. That fluency in nuance begins to look like infrastructure in a city as fleeting as London, where Shoreditch teams frequently pull from a dozen passports at once.
This does not imply that English is becoming less popular. It isn’t. It continues to be the common language of the all-hands, the Slack thread, and the standup. However, that is no longer the whole story. As the neighborhood adapts, it appears that the people who can switch registers, markets, and languages—often within the same meeting—will own Shoreditch for the next ten years. The question that remains unanswered is whether the talent pool will continue to grow.
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