PHONEMIC COMPARISON OF ARABIC AND ENGLISH

Abstract

Arabic is considered a religious and sacred language for Pakistani Muslims. It is because the Holy Quran was revealed in the Arabic language. Arabic is taught in all educational institutes as a subject especially in religious institutes. The holy Quran, Hadith, Sunnah and theology of the Muslims are taught in the Arabic language in Pakistan with their Urdu translation. Arabic and Englishbelong to different families of languages. Arabic is one of the Semitic languages whereas English is the West Germanic language. Both Arabic and English manifest themselves through various dialects based on diversified geographical areas. According to Ethnologue 2019, there are 24,900,000 speakers of Arabic in Saudi Arabia whereas the total number of Arabic speakers in the world are 273,989,700. On the other hand, English is spoken as a first language by 379,007,140 speakers and the total number of English speakers in the world is 1,132,366,680 (Ethnologue, 2019). Arabic is used as a religious language by Pakistani Muslims and all the Muslims in the world have special respect and attachment toward the Arabic language.No significant work has been done on its phonology in Pakistan. The present research article is an effort to explainthe phonemic comparison of Arabic and English. The inventories of both the languages are used as data and the Levenshtein algorithm is used as a theoretical framework in this research. Both the inventories are analysed to compute the ratio of differences and similarities between the phonemes of these languages. The result of the present research shows that both Arabic and English have a phonemic similarity level of 71.69% whereas the index of difference is 28.3%.