The Invisible Language Tax: Token Premiums of French and Regional Languages in 2026 LLM Tokenizers, and a French-Optimized Prototype
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 languages. We measure this token premium on seven tokenizers of widely used 2026 models (OpenAI o200k, Llama 3, Qwen3, DeepSeek V3/V4, Gemma 3, Mistral Tekken, and the Claude generation-5 tokenizer via Anthropic's counting API) on NTREX-128 (124 non-English reference translations) and on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for regional languages. French requires 31% to 58% more tokens than English, whereas Simplified Chinese ranges from 5% fewer to 40% more and is cheaper than French on six of the seven tokenizers. Regional and overseas lan...
| Authors | Thomas Serval |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 30 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 September 2026 |
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