Going from Hindi to Urdu (اردو) has a composite linguistic distance of 12% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.
Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.
Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.
Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.
Devanagari → Arabic
Indo-European ↔ Indo-European
Word pairs that share a common etymological root — instantly recognisable across both languages:
The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Hindi:
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