Presumably you mean a natural language like French or Mandarin? Depends on the language, on your other skills, and what kind of career opportunities you want.
Knowing another language well can be very helpful in your career. For example, the best jobs I have had in my entire career were the ones I was able to secure in Germany because I spoke fluent German. But if I hadn't wanted to work in German-speaking countries, German wouldn't have been much use in my IT career. Although being a qualified German-English translator has been very handy as a secondary source of income during periods when I have been unable to find IT work!
Of course, some customer-facing jobs may require you to speak to people abroad in their own language - this might be anything from first-line support to business analysis, sales and customer relationships etc - and it can sometimes be handy having somebody around who can at least make the occasional phone call in a foreign language.
But it takes a
lot of work to learn another language well enough to function competently in it at a
professional level. It's not just knowing the basic vocabulary and grammar, but also understanding how native speakers use the language in different ways in both formal and informal settings. If you want to work professionally in another language, you need to be able to contribute actively in meetings and informal conversations, create and understand formal documentation, make presentations, discuss serious topics with colleagues and customers, and build working relationships with colleagues in their own language. In order to develop these skills, you really need to be able to immerse yourself in the language for longer periods e.g. by living and working in the relevant country for many months at least
As many UK users of offshore customer support services will tell you, there are a lot of people working on those offshore phonelines who may have learned English at school/college but cannot communicate very well in English over the phone. I've worked with far too many "onshored" IT staff whose technical skills and qualifications may have been excellent, but there was no way to find out because nobody could understand what they said or wrote, and they couldn't understand what was being said to them either. Having worked in a foreign language environment myself, I have a lot of sympathy with the challenges faced by people working in a foreign language, but if somebody is being paid to do a job, they need to ensure they have - or acquire - the skills to do that job competently, and communication skills are as vital as programming skills in software development. After all, you can probably teach someone
Java a lot quicker than you can teach them French or Mandarin, and most workplaces have plenty of people who can speak their local language far better than you can: the only distinctive thing you can offer is your professional experience and skills.
So you would need to be highly motivated in order to put enough time and effort into learning a new language successfully to a professional level. And even then, you might still not find it makes much difference to your career opportunities e.g. perhaps there is no real need for people with your technical skills/experience who can also speak that language. You need to decide for yourself if you have that motivation, and what the career opportunities in your target language might be.
To be honest, unless you have a particular language that you would love to learn for its own sake - not just for a potential job - I would advise you to invest the time/effort in improving your professional skills instead, and take every opportunity to practice/develop any foreign language skills you already have, because this is more likely to give you a relatively quick return on a far smaller investment. If you have always wanted to learn a specific language, do it for the love of the language and the culture it will open up to you, not just to get a slightly better/different IT job.
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