Frequency System of Phonemes: Contrastive Analysis of Common Standard Persian and English Consonants in Context-Based Corpora

This paper is concerned with the contrastive analysis of the frequency system of common standard Persian and English consonants. Two corpora were selected from Iranian newspapers. One of them is Keyhan newspaper that is published in Persian and the other one is Tehran Times newspaper that goes under press in English in Iran. Common standard Persian and English consonants were enumerated and analyzed by themselves and with respect to parts of speech, manner of articulation and place of articulation. Results indicated a significant difference between the frequency of eleven Persian consonants and their English counterparts. Nouns comprised the highest frequency of consonants and while prepositions, determiners and conjunctions had the lowest. With respect to manner of articulation, there was a significant difference between both languages in all manners with stops as the most frequent in both. As for the place of articulation, there was a significant difference between both languages and alveolars were the most frequent in both. Regarding manner of articulation, English stops and liquids were more frequent than those of Persian. With respect to place of articulation, just English alveolars were more frequent than the Persian ones. The frequency of all other places was higher in Persian. In spite of frequent differences between both languages, many similarities were also identified in terms of their frequency systems, and the frequency of consonants with respect to parts of speech, manner of articulation and place of articulation