Zulkipli Mat Isa

People make many different sounds. The most important of them are known as linguistic sounds, which are represented by the consonants and vowels of human languages. The characteristics of consonants have been studied in modern phonetics based on several international foundations and standards, represented by four considerations, the first one is: the points of articulation, the second: the ways in which air exits, the third: the state of the two vocal cords, and the last: the condition of the back of the tongue when pronouncing these consonant sounds. In view of the first consideration, the consonants were given many names that go back to the names of the organs of speech that participated in their production, such as glottal consonant, pharyngeal consonant,uvular consonant, velar consonant, dental consonant and so on. Consonants were also described, in view of other considerations, with many characteristics, such as plosive, affricate, fricative, trill, nasal, lateral, voiceless, voiced, and others. This research will focus -primarily -on studying the consonants of the Arabic and Malay languages, in a constrastive study, aiming to reveal the differences and similarities between the Arab and Malay peoples in term of their points of articulation in producing their consonant sounds, as well as determining the pronunciation capabilities that speakers of the two languages employed when producing these sounds. This requires limiting the research to studying the consonants of the two languages by looking at only one aspect of the previous considerations, which is the points of articulation or the places where these sounds emerge when they are pronounced. The research also attempts to address the problems that learners of both languages may suffer from in pronouncing some words that includes these consonants due to the differences resulting from the different sound outputs in using the pronunciation capabilities of the articulatory organs.