By @IBMResearch
Publication Date: 2025-11-28 15:30:00
India is the most populous country in the world, home to nearly 1.4 billion people and one of the most linguistically diverse societies on the planet. The Indian Constitution recognizes 22 official languages, but the linguistic richness extends much further: More than 1,500 languages and dialects are spoken across different states, communities, and regions. These languages span multiple families — including Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, and Austroasiatic — and exhibit deeply varied linguistic structures.
For AI systems and large language models (LLMs), India presents both an extraordinary opportunity and a unique challenge.
Indic languages are uniquely exigent for LLMs, because they have rich morphology that generates many word forms from a single root, as well as complex script systems with conjuncts and context-dependent rendering, and diverse orthographic norms that vary across regions and writing conventions. In addition, high-quality training data for most Indic…
