The EMILLE Project (Enabling Minority Language Engineering) was established to construct a 67 million word corpus of South Asian languages. In addition, the project has had to address a number of issues related to establishing a language engineering (LE) environment for South Asian language processing, such as translating 8-bit language data into Unicode and producing a number of basic LE tools. This paper will focus on the corpus construction undertaken on the project and will outline the rationale behind data collection. In doing so a number of issues for South Asian corpus building will be highlighted.