A monumental reference for the languages and scripts of India (British India) is the multi-volume Linguistic Survey of India edited by Grierson (with about 10,000 pages). The objective of this project is to digitalize this work and to provide an on-line searchable access for the languages and scripts in India.

The Linguistic Survey of India (Calcutta, 1903-28) edited by George A. Grierson (1851-1941) is the only comprehensive survey of the languages of British India, describing more than 500 dialects of 179 languages.

As writing is a tool for expressing language, writing systems invariably reflect characteristics of the languages they represent. In this sense, research into the phonological and morphological typology of the languages of South Asia and Southeast Asia is extremely important in elucidating the nature of Indic scripts.
On-line searchable access to the LSI will be valuable to the study of both the languages and scripts of this region.

The first edition of the LSI has been digitalized into graphic files, which are now available in PDF format.

Proper nouns, for places and languages appearing in the text, and chapter titles have been compiled as indices to the PDF files. The LSI database is available at:

http://jcs.aa.tufs.ac.jp/LSI/