Contrastive Analysis of Yoruba and Arabic Languages: Its Analytical Studyof 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.