South Asia from c. 1750

South Asia, a region that has been defined variously to include all or parts of present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and occasionally Myanmar and the Tibet Autonomous Region, is home to about a quarter of the world’s population and is the scene of much of its linguistic diversity. Each of these nations has adopted a different set of official languages. Some have enshrined multilingualism at the national or provincial levels, while others have chosen a single language to serve as an official national language. Sri Lanka, for example, amended its constitution in 1987 to name both Sinhalese and Tamil as official and national languages, with English retained as a ‘link language’, and the 8th Schedule to the Indian Constitution currently designates twenty-two official languages, with an official ‘three-language formula’ implemented in 1968 by India’s Ministry of Education.