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The People Clusters of Southern Asia
By Justin Long
This month, we look at the people group clusters of southern Asia.1 This region of the world is essentially India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan.
South Asia is home to seventy-three people group clusters. However, there is a significant population difference: thirty-nine of the groups have populations in excess of 100,000 people (thirty are larger than one million), while the remaining are small groups of under 100,000. These smaller groups make up 500,000 (mostly expatriate) people, including: Anglo-Americans, Bantus, Filipinos, Japanese, Lao, etc. We will not address these very small groups in this particular survey, but one should not forget their presence.
The “major” thirty-nine groups represent 1.3 billion people in southern Asia. Of the thirty-nine groups that are larger than 100,000 people in size, twenty-nine are unreached; these account for 1.2 billion people. Despite the many wonderful reports coming from this section of the world, there remains a substantial amount of work to be done in southern Asia.
The thirty-nine clusters include:
|
People Cluster |
Population (in millions) |
| Adi | 0.4 |
| Assamese | 5.4 |
| Baloch | 0.1 |
| Bengali | 217.9 |
| Bhil | 14.3 |
| Bhojpur-Maithili | 0.4 |
| Bhutanese | 1.3 |
| Bihari | 0.3 |
| Burmese | 0.4 |
| Garo-Tripuri | 4.8 |
| Gond | 16.1 |
| Gujarati | 31.0 |
| Gypsy | 6.7 |
| Hindi | 416.8 |
| Jat | 26.0 |
| Kannada | 36.4 |
| Kashmiri | 6.3 |
| Kuki-Chin-Naga | 4.9 |
| Malayali | 35.7 |
| Maldivian | 0.4 |
| Marathi-Konkani | 59.2 |
| Miri-Kachin | 0.7 |
| Mizo-Lushai | 0.7 |
| Mon-Khmer | 1.3 |
| Munda-Santal | 15.5 |
| Nepali-Pahari | 14.5 |
| Oraon | 4.2 |
| Oriya | 16.3 |
| Other South Asian | 7.2 |
| Pathan | 12.5 |
| Punjabi | 16.6 |
| Rajasthan | 45.9 |
| South Himalaya | 4.8 |
| Sindhi | 0.3 |
| Sinhala | 14.4 |
| Tamil | 52.8 |
| Telugu | 53.8 |
| Tibetan | 1.2 |
| Urdu Muslim | 159.9 |
The Super Giant Clusters
Of these clusters, perhaps the most visible are the three “super giants”: the Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu Muslims, each with populations in excess of 100 million people (the Hindi cluster, in particular, comprises over 400 million). Together, they total 800 million. For comparison, this is nearly three times America’s 300 million, slightly smaller than the population of Africa (900 million), and greater than Europe's 700 million.
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Justin Long manages strategicnetwork.org and is senior editor for Momentum, a magazine devoted to unreached peoples. He can be reached at justinlong@gmail.com. |
