Contrastive and Comparative Approaches to Languages in Malaysia

The contrastive and comparative analyses are two methods in linguistics that involved the comparison of linguistic elements between two languages or more. Basically, they refer to activities of finding the similarities and differences between dialects or languages. However, both terms may have different meanings. Contrastive involves the comparison of different languages that are not from the same language family. On the other hand, comparative involves the comparison of languages from the same language family and dialects from the same language. The chapters in this book focus on both contrastive and comparative comparison in terms of theory and application. Theoretically, this book describes the comparative theory framework or contrastive and comparative tools that can be used to make linguistic comparison. In terms of application, the contrastive and comparative methods are used to analyse the Malay language and dialects in its comparative framework with other languages or dialects.