Degree of Lexical Similarity between English and Kurdish

Abstract

Indo-European languages are the native languages of the habitants of south and west Eurasia. It is the largest spoken language family in the world with 3.5 billion speakers, corresponding to 46% of the world population. Kurdish and English are genetically related, belong to the same family branch of languages, and are believed to have evolved from a common proto-language. Lexical Similarity measures the similarity and/or difference between a set of words from any given two languages. Despite the abundance of lexical similarity coefficients between various world languages in the literature, there are no available data on Kurdish, even though many Kurdish natives learn English as L2. The objective of this paper is to estimate the lexical similarity between two remotely related Indo-European languages. Our results showed (8.75%) and (9.75%) lexical similarity between English and Kurdish according to the Leipzig-Jakarta and Swadesh lists respectively; giving the average of (9.25%). In conclusion, English and Kurdish languages are related Indo-European languages and the lists used in this research are proven to be reliable in the comparison between the studied languages. These cognates can be helpful for the learners and teachers of Kurdish and Kurdish in their language acquisition process.