While there are significant numbers of Chinese and Russian Yii developers, it's always been an English first project, all documentation is in English (as well as other languages) and almost all 3rd party extensions are written in English too.
Regarding coding standards, Yii 1.x code does indeed have quite a cramped style and this (afaik) was never documented, it was more of an informal agreement between contributors to maintain a consistent feel. But why did you find this a barrier for entry when writing applications on top of it? It's only whitespace and of course, you're free to use your own conventions in your own code.