Which Language Should a Skeleton Speak? Language Choices in Multilingual Reasoning
This study addresses the unclear mechanisms underlying skeleton language selection in multilingual mathematical reasoning and the lack of systematic research beyond English-centric settings. We propose a language-aware skeleton exploration framework that integrates greedy decoding, multi-trajectory evaluation, translation ablation, and cross-benchmark validation to systematically analyze skeleton language effects across varying model scales and linguistic conditions. Our findings reveal that the skeleton language is fundamentally a context-dependent design variable rather than a fixed optimal choice, identifying three distinct patterns of inconsistent language effects. Furthermore, we demonstrate that English skeletons confer only marginal advantages for smaller models operating in low-resource languages and are not universally optimal. This work provides new perspectives for optimizing multilingual reasoning systems by challenging the default assumption favoring English as the skeleton language.