Contrastive Analysis of Yoruba and Arabic Languages: Its Analytical Study of the Grammatical Level

Abstract

This study investigated the nexus between Arabic and Yoruba languages through a contrastive analysis, in order to examine their syntactic or structural relationship, as well as potential connections that could enable students of Arabic as a second language to identify possible issues and their solutions. Accordingly, this study identified possible linguistic similarities that could result in the ease of learning the Arabic language for non-Arabic speakers. It gave a highlight of some grammatical differences that could slow down the acquisition process. Adopting the descriptive analytical approach, the study concluded that there is almost a complete similarity between the Arabic and Yoruba languages in the way gender is being used for simple, descriptive and relative structures. The study discovered that the problem lies in the fact that the latter lacks the parsing of sentences and gender applications to some extent.