The Levenshtein algorithm (Levenshtein, 1965) is used to analyse the inventories to calculate the ratio of differences and similarities. The inventories are used as data in this research paper. The index of differences and similarities is determined through the inventories of both languages. This study is an attempt to describe the phonemic differences between English and Punjabi by using the theoretical framework of the Levenshtein algorithm. Unfortunately, no considerable work has been done on its phonology. It is among twenty-two languages that have obtained official status. In Pakistan, it is the language of the majority of the people residing in the most populous province of Pakistan, Punjab. According to Ethnologue (2019), the total number of Punjabi speakers is 125,326,840. The importance of Punjabi cannot be denied being the 10th most widely used language on the globe (Ghai & Singh, 2013). So, the total speakers of English around the globe are 1,132,366,680 (Ethnologue, 2019). English is used as the first language by 379,007,140 speakers and further 753,359,540 speakers use it as a second language in more than 104 nations. Both English and Punjabi manifest themselves through various dialects on the basis of diversified geographical areas.
Punjabi is spoken by various nations on the globe, especially Pakistan and its province Punjab as well as in Indian Panjab. English is one of the West Germanic languages whereas Punjabi is a part of the Indo-Aryan family. The main hypothesis of this study is based on the fact that English and Portuguese degree of genetic difference may be less than 30% considering that the comparison of English with other Romance languages has resulted in similar indexes.The study is aimed at assisting students of English or Portuguese as an L2 with their language acquisition through the identification of items which present similarities in both languages and in this manner aid vocabulary acquisition.Įnglish and Punjabi are languages which do not belong to the same families of languages. The purpose of this research is to calculate this level of lexical similarity through the computational lexical distance comparison of 500 high frequency words in English and Portuguese and the identification of cognates. However, English is a Germanic language whereas Portuguese is a Romance language. When calculating the similarity index between English and Portuguese it is important to have in consideration the amount of Latin loan words English has received from Latin which may influence the similarity index. Although the studies which calculate the similarity index between languages are abundant, to date the similarity index between English and Portuguese has not been calculated.
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