Phonemic Variations in Similar Words of Turkish and Urdu Language

Urdu language is a member of Indo-European family tree and within the zone of Indo-Iranian branch, whereas Turkish language is a member of Altaic family tree. Both of these languages belong to different family trees, but these languages have many words in common. Urdu language has 41 consonant sounds and 11 vowel sounds, whereas Turkish language has 21 consonant sounds and 8 vowel sounds. Both of these languages don't have same number of phonemes. It is interesting to contemplate, how the speakers of both languages produce and perceive these common words in their languages. Therefore, a study is designed to explore the phonemic variations in similar words of Urdu and Turkish languages. In order to find out variations, a list of 75 words, which are common in Urdu and Turkish language was prepared in form of text. The data of this study was collected from Pak-Turk school of Lahore. The prepared words list was given to 10 Turkish speakers. These speakers were selected by using purposive sampling technique. The audios of the speakers were recorded and transcribed into standard Turkish IPA symbols. Levenshtein algorithm framework is used to draw a comparative analysis of Turkish phonemic transcriptions with standard Urdu phonemic transcriptions of the same words. With the help of Levenshtein algorithm, phonemic variations in similar words of both languages was measured. The intriguing result of the study will help in establishing the understanding about the production directions of the similar words used by the speakers of both languages.