Hindustani or Hindi vs. Urdu: A Computational Approach for the Exploration of Similarities Under Phonetic Aspects

Abstract

The semantic coexistence is the reason to adopt the language spoken by other people. In such human habitats, different languages share words typically known as loan words which appears not only as of the principal medium of enriching language vocabulary but also for creating influence upon each other for building stronger relationships and forming multilin-gualism. In this context, the spoken words are usually common but their writing scripts vary or the language may have become a digraphia. In this paper, we presented the similarities and relatedness between Hindi and Urdu (that are mutually intelligible and major languages of Indian sub-continent). In general, the method modifies edit-distance; and works in the fashion that instead of using alphabets from the words it uses articulatory features from the International Phonetic Alphabets (IPA) to get the phonetic edit distance. This paper also shows the results for the languages consonant under the method which quantifies the evidence that the Urdu and Hindi languages are 67.8% similar on average despite the script differences.