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) |
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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.
WHAT'S NEW
We are proud to announce that the 6th Workshop on South and Southeast Asian Natural Language Processing (WSSANLP) has been accepted by the COLING 2016 workshop committee as a collocated event at the COLING 2016. Prof. Dekai Wu, Human Language Technology Center Department of Computer Science and Engineering The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, Hong Kong, and Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Director Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India, has accepted to be co-chairs the 6th WSSANLP.
The 6th WSSANLP will be organized at the Osaka International Convention Center (OICC) (located in Nakanoshima in the center of Osaka) in Osaka, Japan on December 11 - 12, 2016.
