Abstract:
Punctuation is a set of symbols that placed between sentences and words. It prevents confusion
and overlap between them. It aims to help the reader understand what he reads. Research
problem is pointed out with the question "Are there similarities and differences in punctuation
between Arabic, Tamil and English languages, which are from a different language family?”.
This research aims to explore the nature of punctuation marks in Arabic, Tamil and English
languages, and to analyse the similarities and differences between them. This research depends
on the qualitative methodology through contrastive descriptive analysis to find out the
similarities and differences in punctuation between these languages. Secondary information
was collected from books, research papers, and previous studies related to the three mentioned
languages and websites. According to the results, there are various punctuation marks in these
selected languages. They are used according to the specific linguistic contexts of each
language. Based on this, the Tamil language and English use synonymous signs punctuation
marks in their various uses due to they are from the same language family. While the Arabic
language differs by some punctuation from the Tamil and English languages. Punctuation
marks such as (? , ;) that are in Tamil and English differ from punctuation marks in Arabic in
terms of their writing style, such as (؛ ، ؟ .(Thus, the uses of Arabic punctuation marks are
distinguished in some of their uses. From there, this research reveals that there are more
similarities in punctuation than differences between them whence this aspect is the basis of
every living language.
