The digital humanities and re-imagined language description: A linguistic model of Malay with potential for other languages

Abstract

The declaration of 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages raised the question how it will be possible in practice for hitherto uninvestigated languages to be investigated at all. The suggestion put forward in this article is that traditional language description reimagined in the context of the Digital Humanities has the capacity to create models, which can be re-used mutatis mutandis for other languages. The methodology makes use of MaLex, which is a collection of procedures and datasets designed for Malay in the first instance, but with the potential to be modified for other languages. MaLex is placed in its historical context within the Humanities, and digital procedures are explicitly connected to traditional scholarship. The use of digital methods creates new opportunities to scale up practical linguistic analysis using large datasets. MaLex procedures include a stemmer, a tagger, a parser, and a spelling-to-phoneme algorithm, and make a rough English translation of Malay text. MaLex simulates the approach of the practical linguist analysing a new language, and as new components are added, they are made to integrate with existing components, so that MaLex works like a single machine, drawing on an integrated infrastructure.