South Asia – comprising the seven countries Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, as well as immediately adjacent areas of neighboring countries (parts of Afghanistan, China, and Myanmar) – is the home of hundreds of languages belonging to several unrelated language families.
One of the most central aspects of language learning is the learning of words. Casual observation tells us that a learner with a knowledge of the relevant words can get a message across to native speakers, even without much grasp of grammatical structure above word level, whereas for somebody with the opposite distribution of language skills, this will typically not work out.