Asia is extraordinarily linguistically diverse. The 29th edition of Ethnologue (2026), published by SIL Global, catalogs 2,354 living languages across the continent in its dedicated Asia volume, with country overviews and maps of where those languages are spoken.
Among the largest by total speakers worldwide are several Asian languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Bengali, Indonesian, Urdu, Japanese, Vietnamese, Telugu, Turkish, Tamil, Korean, and Thai. They belong to many different families—among them Sino-Tibetan, Indo-European (especially Indo-Aryan and Iranian), Austronesian, Dravidian, Japonic, Koreanic, Kra–Dai, and Turkic—so “languages of Asia” spans far more than one writing system or region.
Source: SIL Global — Ethnologue: Languages of Asia, Twenty-Ninth Edition (2026)