ABSTRACT
Southeast Asia contains approximately one fifth of the world’s population and the area is one of the most multilingual and multicultural on earth. Limiting this account to India (population c. 714 million), Bangladesh (population c. 93 million), Pakistan (population c. 93 million), Sri Lanka (population c. 15 million) and Nepal (population c. 14.5 million), we are still dealing with an area where there are five language families and hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages (India alone has an estimated 850 languages in daily use). The need for lingua francas is thus obvious.
