In multi-linguistic South Asia, Bengali is the language of two nations, India and Bangladesh. With about 220 million native and about 250 million total speakers, Bengali is one of the most spoken languages, ranked seventh in the world. 
 

Burmese is a language spoken in Myanmar, previously known as Burma in English language. The debate goes on about the use of two different names, but the answer can be fairly simple in its vernacular language: it is a matter of using /ba-ma/ in the colloquial or informal style, and /myan-ma/ in the written, literary or formal style. If you are learning Burmese at Cornell, you will be learning both styles of the language – colloquial as well as literary styles.

Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world.  The Department of Asian Studies offers courses in Mandarin for both non-heritage and heritage learners, at a wide range of levels.

Hindi-Urdu is the third most widely spoken language in the world. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan group of languages, a subset of Indo-European.

Bahasa Indonesia is the national language of the archipelagic Indonesian country, spoken throughout the seventeen thousand islands by over 200 million Indonesians with diverse backgrounds.

Japanese is the main language spoken in the Japanese archipelago by a population of over 100 million and the second most widely used language on the internet.

The Kannada language is spoken by more than 50 million people in the state of Karnataka and some of the surrounding regions of India. Most of the Karnataka state government business is conducted in this language.

Khmer is a language in the Austroasiatic language family, one of the six major language families found in Southeast Asia. Khmer is the national language of Cambodia and groups of Khmer speakers could be found also in neighboring countries such as Thailand and Vietnam.

The Korean language is spoken by more than 70 million people living on the Korean peninsula and its outlying islands (the Republic of Korea in the south and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north) and it is ranked the 13th largest language group in the world. 

The national language of Nepal is known as "Nepali". According to the most recent official census, conducted by the Government of Nepal in 2001, Nepal is home to around 20 million speakers of Nepali.

Pali is a literary and liturgical language central to the Buddhist worlds of South and Southeast Asia, including Sri Lanka.

More than 100,000,000 people speak Punjabi. It is the most widely spoken language in Pakistan and is spoken by more than 30 million people in India.

Sanskrit has been the traditional language of scholarship and religion in India for the past 3,000 years. It is the language of the most important scriptures of Hinduism and of Indian Buddhism, but also was the main language for philosophical, scientific and legal works, poems, plays, literary criticism throughout most of Indian history.

Sinhala is considered an Indo-Aryan language, though it has also been influenced by members of the Dravidian language group. Sinhala (sometimes referred to as Sinhalese) is one of the two local languages in the island country of Sri Lanka (population approx. 19 million). It is used widely in the Sri Lankan diaspora, as is Tamil, the second local language of the country.

Tagalog (Filipino) is one of the major languages spoken in the Philippines whose population is now 100 million. It is the native tongue of the people in the Tagalog region in the northern island Luzon

The Tamil language is the language of the Tamil people of India. It is estimated to have over 70 million speakers world wide. It is one of the two Classical Languages of India - the other being Sanskrit - and has official status in Sri Lanka and Singapore.

Thai is an official language based on Bangkok speech.

The Tibetan language records and transmits one of the world’s great civilizations, bridging South and East Asia. Tibetan once served as a lingua franca as well as a clerical and diplomatic language for much of central Eurasia, from the Mongol Dzungar region in today’s Xinjiang through Mongolia, north and west into Russia, east into Manchuria, and south into the parts of what is today India, Nepal and Bhutan.

The Vietnamese language program at the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell offers four levels of language training in Vietnamese from elementary to advanced, and a course in independent study.