The Indic Token Tax in 2026: Measuring Tokenizer. Disparity and Its Cost for the Languages of India
arXiv:2611.13058v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Commercial language model APIs bill per token, so a tokenizer that needs more tokens for the same content in one language makes that language more expensive, slower, and able to fit less text in a fixed context window. We measure this disparity for nine public tokenizers, including those of GPT-4, GPT-4o, Qwen2.5, DeepSeek-V3, Mistral-Nemo and four Sarvam models, on all 25 languages of India available in FLORES-200 (2,009 professionally translated sentences aligned with English) and on 13,732 human-translated Hinglish-English social media pairs f