Language Similarities among Indian Languages: An Analysis of Assamese and Bengali, Schemes and Mind Maps of Linguistics

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ENG 509: Introduction to Language and Linguistics Ananya Das 23maengs M.A English Dr. Sahila Zafar 15th Dec. 2023

Abstract: The present study deals with linguistic similarities among different languages. It contains suitable literature material about linguistic correlation among languages as the majority of Indian Languages have originated from two language families, namely, Indo-European and Dravidian. Therefore, we can expect languages to have in common while their roots belong to corresponding language or exist to a particular language family. Similarities can also be seen among neighboring regions as it may happen due to intermixing between populations of neighboring regions. The paper studies the similarities among Indian languages through the components chosen like: 1.Words, 2. Pronunciation, 3. Sentences, 4. Semantics and 5. Pragmatics. Therefore, the research topic aimed to collect all the similarities among certain language speaking people to know the language analogies and advantages of learning more than one language regarding the target language. SIMILARITIES AMONG DIFFERENT LANGUAGES Introduction: In India, more than 1500 languages are spoken including official and unofficial languages. Therefore, the majority of these languages have derived from these two languages: Indo-European, Dravidian. While talking about languages and its roots a question arises, what is a language family? "A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language." (definition according to Wikipedia) as shown in Figure 1.1 and 1.2.

research articles based on language similarity that studied to understand its importance and language similarities that they have in common. Research Objectives :

1. To understand the importance of lexical similarities.
2. To understand the words or sentences that are common in two particular languages.
3. To analyze certain language roots or historical background. Result: In linguistics, language similarity or lexical similarity is "a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar." (Wikipedia definition) European languages like English and Spanish have many things in common to share when it comes to similarities, as both the languages originated from Latin. Likewise, certain Indian languages like: Assamese, Bengali, Odia which have influence in each other's language and have developed their well designed linguistic characteristics during the course time. While talking about Indian languages in common we can take the example of Assamese and Bengali language as both the languages have many things in common. If we see alphabets of both the languages we will only find slight differences as most of the the alphabets in both languages are same.

Figure 1.3 Assamese Alphabet Chart. Figure 1.4 Bengali Alphabet Chart From the above given charts we can see that both the languages share similar alphabets as well as words. In both Assamese and Bengali language there is no proper term for the word "drink". For e.g: "Moi paani khau" (i drink water) but "khau" basically means "eat". If we go through the context the contextual meaning of the sentence is "i eat water". So the term "eat" is used for both liquid and solid things as there is no specific term

well as the neighboring states spoken by Tamil Nadu and Kerala so it's obvious that both languages have influenced each other. So, the observations can also be justified from the geographical point of view. As the palaces share common boundaries and due to intermixing of people we can conclude that all these languages come from one language speaking family. Conclusion: This paper tries to find out the similarity among different languages using the qualitative method. Through observation we can say that mostly the neighboring languages show similarly. The similarities of two particular languages has been shown with examples and also discussed about their language root or parental language. References:

1. Research Article | Open Access Volume 2015 | Article ID 325703 | https://doi.org/10.1155/2015/
2. Rivera, J. (2019) A Study Conception about Language Similarities. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 9, 47-58. doi: 10.4236/ojml.2019.92005.
3. Study on Similarity among Indian Languages Using Language Verification Framework May 2015 Advances Artificial Intelligence 2015:1- DOI:10.1155/2015/ LicenseCC BY 3.
4. A Study Conception about Language Similarities January 20196 Open Journal of Modern Linguistics 09(02):47-58 DOI:10.4236/ojml.2019. LicenseCC BY 4.

5. Cross-Lingual Semantic Similarity of Words as the Similarity of Their Semantic Word Responses Ivan Vulic and Marie-Francine Moens ´ Department of Computer Science KU Leuven Celestijnenlaan 200A