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How easy is Punjabi for Malayalam speakers?

Going from Malayalam to Punjabi (ਪੰਜਾਬੀ) has a composite linguistic distance of 80% (heuristic estimate). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

80% distance FSI Cat III — ~1,100 hours

Lexical similarity

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance

67%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity

20%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match

Malayalam → Gurmukhi/Arabic

Genealogical kinship

Dravidian ↔ Indo-European

Open the interactive comparison →

Other easy languages for Malayalam speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Malayalam:

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Tamil

21% distance
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Kannada

34% distance
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Telugu

50% distance
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Marathi

72% distance
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Sinhala

77% distance

Think you can tell them apart?

A quick 3-question check between Malayalam and Punjabi. No signup.