Morphological analysis between Arabic and Tamil languages – a contrastive study

Abstract

Acquisition of a second or a foreign language in contrastive method with the learner’s mother tongue would be helpful and easy in acquiring the target language. The learners of Arabic language who speak Tamil language as their mother tongue have been facing several problems during their learning process since these two languages differ from their language families. The study aims to identify the similarities and dissimilarities on the morphological analysis between Arabic and Tamil languages. This study deals with descriptive and contrastive methods to analyze the secondary data. The results indicate that there is morphological analyzing system in both Arabic and Tamil languages while there are more differences than the similarities on kinds of morphemes and methods of analysis. There are more number of morphemes in a single word of Arabic language than Tamil language. At the same time the intonation of a word took place during morphological analysis in Arabic language when compared with Tamil language. Accordingly, the clarity on morphological analysis would be helpful to the learners of Arabic language who speak Tamil language as their mother tongue.