Going from Malayalam to Marathi (เคฎเคฐเคพเค เฅ) has a composite linguistic distance of 72% (heuristic estimate). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.
Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.
Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.
Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.
Malayalam โ Devanagari
Dravidian โ Indo-European
The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Malayalam:
A quick 3-question check between Malayalam and Marathi. No signup.