LexiLink: Exploring the Linguistic Connection Between Afan Oromo & Somali Languages

Welcome to LexiLink! This project is all about diving into the textual and phonemic relationships between the Afan Oromo and Somali languages. Using Python, it analyzes shared words, cleans and tokenizes text, removes stopwords, counts word frequencies, and converts graphemes to phonemes.

Why This Project?

Languages often share hidden patterns, especially those with historical and geographical ties. The goal of LexiLink is to explore these connections by:
✔️ Identifying common words between Afan Oromo & Somali
✔️ Analyzing their phonemic structures
✔️ Understanding their linguistic similarities through data

🛠 How It Works

1. Extract & Clean text samples by tokenization, lemmatization and removal of stopwords
2. Compare & Analyze shared words and Do G2P conversion
3. Visualize phoneme distributions

🚀 Getting Started

1. Clone the Repository

git clone https://github.com/Abe-Alefew/LexiLink.git
cd LexiLink

2. Install Dependencies

pip install numpy matplotlib

🔹 Note:

• re and collections are built-in Python modules, so no installation is needed.
• Ensure you have Python installed by running:

  python --version
  

• It’s recommended to use a virtual environment (venv) to keep dependencies organized.

3. Run the Analysis.

python lexi_link.py

💡 Who Can Use This?

Anyone interested in:
🔹 Linguistics & Computational Analysis
🔹 Text Processing & NLP
🔹 African Language Studies
🔹 Phonetics & Language Comparisons

Dependencies

This project depends on the following libraries:

• collections
• numpy
• re
• matplotlib

🚀 Future Advancements

• Expand Language Coverage – Add more Cushitic and Afro-Asiatic languages.
• AI & NLP Integration – Use machine learning for better lexical similarity detection.
• Visualization & Analytics – Build interactive dashboards for phonemic patterns.
• Efficiency & Optimization – Improve processing speed with advanced phonetic algorithms.
• API & Open Source – Develop an API and foster community-driven contributions.

These enhancements will make LexiLink a powerful tool for linguistic research! 🚀

🤝 Contributing

Have ideas to improve LexiLink? Feel free to:

1. Fork the repo Create a new branch (git checkout -b feature-branch).
2. Make your improvements Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some feature' ). Push to the branch (git push origin feature-branch).
3. Submit a pull request

Your contributions are always welcome! 🚀

📜 License

This project is open-source under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more details.

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Let's explore languages through code! 🌍✨