Essay On Native Language Affect English Language

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Native language can also affect the acquisition of word formation of English negatively. It is commonly term as interference of the first language. According to Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982), interference is an automatic transfer, due to habit, of the surface structure of the first language onto the surface of the target language. Discussions on the extent of word formation in English affecting native speaker of Malay negatively will specifically touch on plurality, mainly in terms of affixes and reduplication.

The function to signal plurality exists in both Malay and English language. However, there are significant differences in the formation of plural forms between both languages. English uses inflectional affixes to signal plurality whereby Malay uses reduplication. Fries (1945), Lado (1957) and Van Els (1984) agreed that different grammatical structure between languages is a possible factor of native speaker incompetency in the targeted language.

Thus, it could be established that Malay speaker find it difficult to understand and use English language plural inflections due to the fact that there are no plural inflections in the Malay language. Unlike the Malay language, the plural formation of words in the English language is much more complicated because there are many …show more content…

However, the meaning of the word can be change by adding “s” at the back of the word, becoming “cats” that indicate more than one cat. However, in Malay, the root word “bangunan” which means building in English tends to have different meaning depending on its affixes. By adding prefix ‘pem-’ to the word causing it to transform into the word ‘pembangunan’ which means development in English. This change brought new meaning to the root word “bangunan”. It is no longer used to describe building but transformed to describe the process of

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