yea I believe they are. I mean shouldn't google account for people speaking spanish linking to an English speaking site. What if people are bilingual? I'm just assuming google is smart enough for that..
It could be a good way for checking genuine links. For instance, a Million links all written in English is unlikely (and likely to have been self promoted links), However if there are the same proportion of links written in languages that cover the internet community, these links are more likely to be genuine. Google has always been synonym based, and uses synonyms to check for keyword density (and doesn't like keyword stuffing), altering languages will also be included as part of these synonyms.