关键词: 侗台语族, 编辑距离, 语言分类

Abstract: The levenshtein distance is a distance metric derived from the number of edit operations needed to transform one string into another. This metric has received recent attention in Western countries as a means of automatically classifying languages into genealogical subgroups, and has been proved to be effective in the measurement of the distances between languages or dialects. This paper applies the algorithm of the levenshtein distance to the computational classification of the Dong-Tai language family languages, and their genetic relationship is described. The calculation results show that the language classification of the levenshtein distance is consistent with that of the historical linguistics, and a new way is proposed for the computational method. The levenshtein distance can be applied to the research of the East Asian languages.

Key words: Dong-Tai language family, levenshtein distance, language classification