🇮🇳 → 🇭🇰

How easy is Cantonese for Punjabi speakers?

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

80% distance FSI Cat IV (Hardest) — ~2,200 hours

Lexical similarity

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance

56%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity

50%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match

Gurmukhi/Arabic → Chinese

Genealogical kinship

Indo-European ↔ Sino-Tibetan

Open the interactive comparison →

Other easy languages for Punjabi speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Punjabi:

🇵🇰

Urdu

32% distance
🇮🇳

Hindi

36% distance
🇮🇳

Gujarati

44% distance
🇳🇵

Nepali

45% distance
🇮🇳

Marathi

52% distance

Think you can tell them apart?

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