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Item type:Publication, Internal order and areal patterns in South Asian numerals(De Gruyter, 2025-01-01)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.4 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Decimal systems around the world(Royal Society, 2025-10-20)Decimal numeral systems (base-10) are the most widespread type of counting system across the world's languages. Their ubiquity has often been attributed to presumed functional advantages, including ease of use, cognitive efficiency and arithmetical transparency. In principle, decimal systems represent numbers as compositions involving a form representing 10 and smaller atomic numerals (e.g. Mandarin shí sān 'thirteen', literally 'ten three'). In practice, however, many languages exhibit deviations that obscure this compositional logic—such as allomorphy ( fifteen in English, as opposed to five-ten ), suppletion (e.g. Russian sorok 'forty', unrelated to četyre 'four' or desjat' 'ten'), or secondary structures involving other compositional elements (e.g. 5). Despite being frequently mentioned in the literature, these violations have not been systematically analysed at scale. Here, we develop a rule-based classification of decimal systems and apply it to a curated, genealogically and geographically balanced sample of 118 languages. We assess each system along three dimensions— transparency , canonicity and compositionality —and show that, while surface-level irregularities are widespread, the underlying mathematical structure of decimal systems remains highly regular and patterned. These results reveal that deviations from perfect decimality are not random but instead reflect structured variation shaped by historical, cognitive and typological constraints. This article is part of the theme issue 'A solid base for scaling up: the structure of numeration systems'.3