🇮🇳 → 🇵🇰

How easy is Urdu for Malayalam speakers?

Going from Malayalam to Urdu (اردو) 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 → 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:

🇮🇳

Tamil

21% distance
🇮🇳

Kannada

34% distance
🇮🇳

Telugu

50% distance
🇮🇳

Marathi

72% distance
🇱🇰

Sinhala

77% distance

Think you can tell them apart?

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