How many languages are spoken in southern Asia?

Southern Asia is a diverse region that is home to over 500 languages, belonging to different language families:

- The Indo-Aryan languages are the most widely spoken, such as Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Sindhi, Marathi, Nepali, Assamese, Bengali, Oriya and Kashmiri.

- The Dravidian languages are spoken in southern India, and include Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

- The Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken in the northern Himalayan region, which includes Tibetan, Burmese, and a variety of smaller languages of Nepal, Bhutan and northeast India.

- Additionally, some of the Austroasiatic languages can be heard through parts of Southeast Asia, for example Vietnamese.