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Background and Purpose: This paper aims to highlight the voicing contrast of Arabic and Malay fricatives produced by Malay native speakers. Previous studies show that Malay speakers often make mistakes on Arabic pharyngealisation. Methodology: This study, thus, analysed the frication duration characteristics of Malay and Arabic fricatives in initial word position and highlight their similarities and differences. The spectrographic analysis method via Praat software was utilized to enable the researcher to transfer speech recording data into a spectrogram and analysed acoustically. A total of 2960 spectrograms was obtained from the recording of 24 subjects' utterences. The subjects are undergraduate students of Arabic Studies and Islamic Civilization of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. The recording process was performed in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, UKM recording studio using TASCAM MP3 / WAV recorder. A word list that contains the fricative sound at the beginning of each word in both languages was read by subjects with comfortable speech level, i.e. neither slow nor too fast. Subjects were asked to repeat the word five times. Findings: The result of the acoustic analysis was manipulated using Statistical Package for Social Sciences. This study found that the fricative sound / s / is longer than the sound / z / for both languages. The findings also show that there is no significant relationship between sound / س / and / sˤ / and / / ز and / zˤ /. In particular, this study confirms that not all Arabic pharyngealisation are influenced by their native language. It can be mastered also by non-native speakers of Arabic. Contributions: This study provides significant implications for learning Arabic as a second language in Malaysia as well as the development of acoustic phonetics, particularly, in improving the fricative pronunciation of Arabic among native speakers of Malay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]