Large language models are increasingly deployed as general-purpose educational and technical assistance systems, but their underlying infrastructure does not treat languages equally. One underexamined source of disparity is tokenization: semantically equivalent content can require substantially different token counts across languages, affecting API cost, latency, and usable context length before a model is invoked.
Large language models (LLMs) process text through subword tokenizers rather than directly reading characters or words. Because these tokenizers are trained predominantly on English-centric corpora, they introduce a systematic and often overlooked disadvantage for many non-English languages.
arXiv:2607. 24276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) process text through subword tokenizers rather than directly reading characters or words.
arXiv:2607. 23319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard subword tokenization algorithms such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) and SentencePiece are trained predominantly on modern language corpora and produce inefficient segmentations when applied to classical Indian languages.
arXiv:2507.23248v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bengali is spoken by more than 230 million people, yet no standardized instrument evaluates large language models (LLMs) on Bengali across th...
arXiv:2609.39001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM services are billed per token and context windows are measured in tokens, yet the number of tokens needed for the same content varies across lang...
arXiv:2606. 24460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Commercial large language models bill, scale latency, and budget context per token.
arXiv:2608.21384v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern multilingual tokenizers often fragment Ukrainian and other underrepresented Cyrillic-script languages more heavily than English, creating disp...
The paper shows that HuggingFace’s ByteLevel pre‑tokenizer, which treats a word as a sequence of Unicode letters, splits abugida scripts at every vowel sign, creating a training‑free lower bound on tokenizer fertility. Across 26 languages, all 17 abugidas exhibit increased token counts (up to 9×), while Latin, Cyrillic, Hangul, and Han remain unchanged. The authors demonstrate that correcting the character class reduces Nepali token counts, improves model performance, and that this issue is widespread in popular HuggingFace models.
arXiv:2608.30092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Arkios, a 1.04B-parameter dense transformer pretrained from scratch on 150B tokens of bilingual English-Nepali text, using a custom single...
arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.
arXiv:2606. 03618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-assisted coding agents are bottlenecked by input-token cost.
arXiv:2609.00378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models pay a well-documented tax on non-English text: the same content costs several times more tokens, and because attention is quadrat...