Comparison processes can involve all levels of linguistic structuring.

For example:

• It may be interesting to note that alphabets have very different characteristics from one language to another: individual signs (or letters) do not always correspond to a sound (as they do in English, Italian, Spanish, ...); there are alphabets where each sign corresponds to an entire word (for example, in Chinese).

• On the semantic and lexical level, comparison highlights how there is not always a "precise" translation of words betwen languages. Sometimes the meaning of the two words can partially differ.  An example: in English there is no a single word for the Italian “azzurro”; so we must use the "nearest" word: “blue”, qualifying it with the adjective “light” to modify its semantics (azzurro = light blue).

• On the morphological plane, comparison can show how the same meaning can be conveyed in a synthetic way (i.e. using a single word) or analytically (i.e. using multiple words). For example, in Western Greenlandic, the phrase "he is at home" can be translated into one word, "illuminiippuq".

Another interesting example for comparison is Arabic. Unlike what happens in many languages (eg Italian and English, ...), to make a singular word plural in Arabic, the final part of the word is not changed (eg. libro → libri, book → books) but the word changes "internally": the singular KITAB, changes vowels to become KUTUB.

• Concerning syntax, comparing different languages shows how words can be placed in different orders in different language phrases. For example, in Italian and English the most frequent way of arranging words in the subject subject-verb-object (Gianni eats the apple). In many languages, however, such Turkish in Pashtu, the most widespread order is subject- object-verb (Gianni the apple eats). In other languages (less common), such standard Arabic, the verb is placed at the beginning and the most frequent order is the verb-subject-object (Mangia Gianni la mela).