South and Southeast Asian Natural Language Procesing

This website is dedicated to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistic (CL) work on South and Southeast Asian Languages. Here you will find online systems for these languages, Computational Resources, a comprihensive contact list of people working on these languages, etc.

South and Southeast Asian Region and its Languages

South Asia comprises of the countries- Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Southeast Asia, on the other hand, consists of Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, Philippines and Singapore. The following table gives an idea about the size of population and the number of living languages in the regions of South and Southeast Asia.

Sr.	Country	Population	Living Languages
1	India	1,134,403,000	438
2	Indonesia	248,496,420	719
3	Pakistan	158,081,000	72
4	Bangladesh	153,281,000	42
5	Viet Nam	85,029,000	106
6	Philippines	84,566,000	171
7	Thailand	63,003,000	74
8	Burma	47,967,000	111
9	Nepal	27,094,000	124
10	Malaysia	25,653,000	137
11	Sri Lanka	19,094,000	7
12	Cambodia	13,511,970	23
13	Afghanistan	12,164,970	52
14	Singapore	4,327,000	21
15	Laos	2,796,000	84
16	East Timor	1,067,000	19
17	Bhutan	637,000	25
18	Brunei	374,000	15
19	Maldives	359,000	1
Total		2,081,904,360	2241
Source (Lewis, 2009)

Table 1: Population and Number of Living Languages of South and Southeast Asia

The 2241 languages described in Table 1 belong to different language families like Indo-Aryan, Indo-Iranian, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic, Kradai, Hmong-Mien, etc. In terms of population, South Asia and Southeast Asia represent 34.94% of the total population of the world. Some of the languages of these regions have a large number of native speakers: Hindi (5th largest according to number of its native speakers), Bengali (6th), Punjabi (12th), Tamil (18th), Urdu (20th), etc.

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