Arabic: The Language Of The Arabic And English Language

Arabic is the official language in many countries, including Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Morocco. Arabic is also the language of the Koran, so Muslims of all nationalities, such as Indonesians, are familiar with it. There are many Arabic dialects, but there is one version that is taught in schools and used by the media across the Arab world.

Arabic is from the Semitic language family, hence its grammar is very different from English. There is a large potential for errors of interference when Arab learners produce written or spoken English. Arabic has a three consonant root as its basis. All words (parts of speech) are formed by combining the three-root consonants with fixed vowel patterns and, sometimes, an affix. Arab learners may

Short vowels are unimportant in Arabic, and indeed do not appear in writing. Texts are read from right to left and written in a cursive script. No distinction is made between upper and lower case, and the rules for punctuation are much looser than in English.

Unsurprisingly, these fundamental differences between the Arabic and English writing systems cause Arab learners significant problems. They usually need much more time to read or write than their English-learning peers from the Indo-European language families.

Phonology: English has about three times as many vowel sounds as Arabic, so it is inevitable that beginning learners will fail to distinguish between some of the words they hear, such as ship / sheep or bad / bed, and will have difficulties saying such words correctly.

Problems in pronouncing consonants include the inability to produce the th sounds in words such as this and thin, the swapping of /b/ and /p/ at the beginning of words, and the substitution of /f/ for /v/. Consonant clusters, such as in the words split, threw or lengths, also cause problems and often result in the speaker adding an extra vowel: spilit, ithrew or