Contrastive Analysis Study of Phonetic Vowel and Consonant Between English and Acehnese Language

This study investigated the contrastive of phonological systems of English and Acehnese languages which supply several similarities and differences. The study aimed to discover the similarities of vowels and consonants between English and Acehnese and to investigate the dissimilarities of vowels and consonants between English and Acehnese. This study is a library research which used descriptive qualitative approach. It was applied to collect primary and secondary data.It is designed to report the description emerges following creative exploration, and serves to organize the findings in order to fit them with explanations, and then test or validate those explanations. The research found that there is similiarities in the combination of the two vowels, open central unrounded vowel */a/ and high back vowel */u/ of English underwent changed into half close back vowel /o/ in Acehnese when it was preceded by any sound of consonants. The consonant sounds into voiceless consonant sounds in the end-position of a word, and this process occurs regularly, for instance, the sound */ŋ/, Single Consonant /s/, DoubleConsonant /tr/, and so on. the dissimilarities, the sound pattern (pure vowel) of Acehnese and English language, we can see that English has tense and lax pure vowel whereas Acehnese has mid long and lax vowel. This difference puts a strain to the learners, then, there is a mismatch between sounds and letters: in English pronunciation, sometimes two letters combine to represent one sound, so that ‘s’+‘h’ combine to represent the sound /ʃ/ and ‘t’+ ‘h’ combine for /θ/, and sometimes one letter is pronounced as a sequence of two sounds, as ‘x’ is usually /ks/.