বাংলাদেশের লুসেই ও পাংখুয়া ভাষা: তুলনামূলক বিশ্লেষণ

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of the endangered Lushei and Pangkhua languages of Bangladesh. Among the languages of the Kuki-Chin sub-branch (Lushei- Pangkhua-Bawm-Khiang-Khumi-Rengmitca) of the Sino- Tibetan language family spoken in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, these two languages have been brought into special focus. The Linguistic Survey of Bangladesh 2018 recognized Pangkhua as a distinct language. From a linguistic perspective, the two languages not only share many similarities but also exhibit several differences. For this study, we have selected 207 words from linguist Morris Swadesh's word list to assess lexical similarity and identified their equivalents in both Lushei and Pangkhua. Lushei has been used as the base language for comparison. We have calculated the lexical similarity percentage by measuring character-level differences and word lengths using the Levenshtein distance algorithm. Based on the distance values from the 207 word pairs, we have applied the Blair model to categorize the words into levels of similarity.