Abstract The linguistic diversity present in South Asia stems from its historical mix of cultures, as well as its heterogeneous topography. This diversity can be observed in numeral systems, which play an important role in cognitive and cultural history. We provide the first typological overview of numeral systems in South Asia, presenting a database of 122 languages – mostly Austroasiatic, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and Tibeto-Burman, with a majority of data from original fieldwork. We also provide a framework for analyzing numeral systems based on the internal ordering of their complex numerals (teens, crowns, running numbers, hundreds, and thousands). Quantitative analyses based on decision trees and phylogenetic regressions suggest that internal ordering of complex numerals are generally stable in each language family along history, although horizontal transmission due to historical contact phenomena are observed as well. Our study also has a societal impact: the diversity of numeral systems featured here is quickly disappearing, and we claim that it is of the utmost importance to document and preserve it.
Kumari et al. (2025) studied this question.