A preliminary tentative comparison of the structures of some Chadian languages with English
A preliminary tentative comparison of the structures of some Chadian languages with English

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the structural similarities between English and Chadian languages. Chad is a country in Sub-Saharan Africa that exhibits a linguistic heterogeneous situation. The estimate of the number of indigenous languages and dialects spoken in Chad is 180. Thus, the languages chosen for the purpose of this study are Ngambay, Mundand, Musey, Tupuri, and Chadian Arabic. It should be noted that all these languages are not only spoken, but they are also written and used for literary education. In addition, English is a foreign language. It is taught as a subject in secondary schools and as a course at universities. French and Arabic are official languages. So, Chadian students studying English therefore have a complex linguistic background. A case in point concerns students of the Higher Teachers’ Training School in N’Djamena. This paper therefore is an attempt to compare the structure of English with the students’ mother tongues in written production. The Chadian National Alphabet has been used for the transcription of the students’ indigenous languages. The Contrastive Analysis theory has also been adopted to compare the structures of these languages. In a linguistically multi-setting like Chad, it is important to attempt to bring languages closer in order to identify the differences and similarities between them from the point of view of their structures, and problematic linguistic areas that prevent students from learning English successfully. But it is found that students’ mother tongues do not pose any problem, in contrast to French language that has been used in education.

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