Business Languages of Asia: A Data Reference

This page collects the language data behind our Asia market guides in one place: which languages are official, which are actually used in business, and what the published statistics say. Every figure below is attributed to its original source, dated, and linked to the publication it came from. Where no reliable published figure exists for a market, the cell says so rather than offering an estimate.

Official and business languages by market

Official status and working business language are not always the same thing. This table separates the two, because for most localization decisions the second column matters more than the first.

MarketOfficial / national language(s)Commonly used in businessScript note
ChinaStandard Mandarin (Putonghua)Mandarin; English in multinational settingsSimplified Chinese
Hong KongChinese and EnglishCantonese, English; Putonghua growingTraditional Chinese
IndiaHindi and English (central government); 22 scheduled languagesEnglish and Hindi; regional languages by stateDevanagari and others
IndonesiaBahasa IndonesiaBahasa Indonesia; English in multinationalsLatin
JapanJapaneseJapanese (standard / hyojungo)Kanji, hiragana, katakana; vertical setting possible
MalaysiaMalay (Bahasa Malaysia)Malay and English; Mandarin and Tamil in communitiesLatin
PhilippinesFilipino and EnglishEnglish and Filipino/TagalogLatin
SingaporeEnglish, Mandarin, Malay, TamilEnglishLatin; Simplified Chinese; Tamil
TaiwanMandarin ChineseMandarinTraditional Chinese
ThailandThaiThai; English in tourism and international businessThai
VietnamVietnameseVietnameseLatin (with diacritics)
Official status reflects each market’s constitutional or statutory designation. “Commonly used in business” reflects practical working use.

Published language statistics, with sources

The figures below are the ones we could attribute to a named, dated source. Different sources measure different things — “usual spoken language” is not the same as “can speak” — so the measure is stated in each row. Each source name links to the publication it came from.

MarketWhat is measuredFigureSource
IndiaMain languages identified121Census of India, 2011
IndiaMother tongues with 10,000+ speakers270Census of India, 2011
IndiaConstitutionally recognised (scheduled) languages22Eighth Schedule, Constitution of India
IndiaPopulation reporting Hindi as mother tongue or first language43.63%Census of India, 2011
SingaporeLanguage most frequently spoken at home, residents aged 5+English 48.3%; Mandarin 29.9%; Malay 9.2%; Tamil 2.5%Census of Population 2020, Department of Statistics Singapore
SingaporeEnglish as most frequent home language, change since 201032.3% (2010) to 48.3% (2020)Census of Population 2020, Department of Statistics Singapore
Hong KongUsual spoken languageCantonese 88.2%; English 4.6%; other Chinese dialects 2.8%; Putonghua 2.3%; other 2.1%Hong Kong 2021 Population Census
JapanLiving languages in the countryapprox. 15Ethnologue
JapanStatus of the Ryukyuan languagesAll classified endangeredUNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, 3rd ed., 2010
IndonesiaRegional languages718Indonesia’s Language Agency (Badan Bahasa), language mapping data
VietnamLiving languagesapprox. 110, across 54 recognised ethnic groupsEthnologue
Figures are reproduced from the sources named and linked. Census figures reflect the most recent completed census for each market at the time of writing.

Sources

Full references for every figure above. We link to the publisher rather than to a secondary summary, so you can check any figure against the original.

Where we do not have a sourced figure

We have deliberately left China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines out of the statistics table. Widely repeated percentages circulate for each of these markets, but we could not attribute them to a named, dated, primary source, so we have not reproduced them here. The official and business language information for those markets in the first table is unaffected.

Methodology

Each figure was taken from a named primary source — a national census, a government language agency, Ethnologue, or UNESCO — and is presented with the measure it refers to, because language statistics are frequently compared when they are not measuring the same thing. Percentages describing home or usual spoken language are not interchangeable with figures describing the number of people who can speak a language. Where sources disagree or a figure could not be attributed, the row is omitted rather than estimated. This page is maintained by AsiaLocalize and updated when new census or agency data is published.

Cite this page

If this reference is useful in your own work, you are welcome to cite or link to it:

AsiaLocalize, Business Languages of Asia: A Data Reference. https://asialocalize.com/business-languages-of-asia/

Please cite the original primary sources named in the tables when quoting a specific figure.

Full country guides

Applying this data

Which language a market actually works in determines how much has to be adapted rather than simply translated. Where that lands depends on the asset: website localization and app localization for products, game localization and multimedia localization where voice and on-screen text are involved, eLearning localization for training material, and transcreation where marketing copy has to be rewritten rather than rendered. Scripts matter separately from language: Japanese vertical setting, Thai, and Devanagari all reflow differently from Latin, which is a multilingual desktop publishing problem rather than a translation one.