What is Linguistic distance?

Linguistic distance is how different two languages feel from each other.

Imagine you have two toy boxes, one has all red blocks, and the other has mostly blue ones. If you look at them closely, they're not completely different, some of the blocks are even the same color. That’s like linguistic distance: it's about how similar or different languages are, based on things like sounds, words, and grammar.

Think of it like a game of "How alike are we?" If two languages share a lot of similar words or sounds, they’re close, like best friends. But if they have very few shared words and different rules, they're farther apart, like classmates who don’t talk much.

For example, English and French are closer than English and Chinese, because they share some similar words and sounds, even though they look and sound a bit different.

So, linguistic distance is just the "how far apart" part of languages, it helps us see how connected or separate they are.