Programming languages and human languages are really not the same thing at all, unless maybe you consider some extreme outliers like AppleScript[1]. It seems like the choice of character set would make a bigger difference. Most of the today's popular languages would seem to be strongly impacted by making them compatible with code that is entirely in 7-bit ASCII. I don't know enough about other character encodings to try to imagine how they might make for a very different programming language design. What would a Chinese-influenced programming language look like if its designer(s) had never had any exposure to alphabetic or syllabic writing systems?