Going from Kannada to Malayalam (เดฎเดฒเดฏเดพเดณเด) has a composite linguistic distance of 34% (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.
Kannada โ Malayalam
Dravidian โ Dravidian
The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Kannada:
A quick 3-question check between Kannada and Malayalam. No signup.