A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON ENGLISH AND ARABIC GENDER

Abstract

English and Arabic are languages which have gender agreement. English belongs to Indo-European language family and Arabic belongs to Semitic language family. They come from different language family, but they have some similarities and differences in gender agreements. In this thesis, the definitions of gender are explained. Genders are defined generally as gender gap, gender in politic and also gender in language. Gender in language is called as grammatical gender. The grammatical gender of English and Arabic is the focus of discussion. The descriptions of gender agreement in this thesis are explored in order to get more understanding about the gender in English and Arabic. Further, by comparing English and Arabic descriptions, the similarities and differences are found. The comparative study is chosen as the methodology of this thesis. The data of this study are collected through library research. The type of data is qualitative data. The analysis belongs to descriptive method. It begins with describing the concept of both languages in term of gender and identifying the similarities and differences between them. After comparing both English and Arabic, it is found that both languages have similarities. The first similarity is using different words and adding suffixes at the end of the nouns. The second similarity is the third singular pronouns which differentiate male from female. Besides the similarities, there are differences between them. The differences are in the verb and adjective agreement. English has not verb and adjective agreement, while Arabic has them.