Comparison of the themes of Malaysian Friday sermons between the year 2010 and 2015

Abstract

One of the analyses used in the field of corpus linguistics is comparing the word occurrence from different text corpora. This technique can be used to identify how a certain discipline change over ti me through text analysis. In this study, the changes of the context of Malaysian Friday sermons are investigated. The text corpus was developed by taking the Friday sermons spoken in Kuala Lumpur mosques in the year 2015. A total of 52 sermons were used for the text corpus because there are a total of 52 Friday sermons in a year. The Malay text corp us was constructed by using PHP and MySQL, and only the top words spoken were inserted into the text corpus. This text corpus is then compared with a previously developed text corpus from 2010 Friday sermons. The new text corpus has almost the same amount of words compared with the old text corpus. The new text corpus overlapped with the old text co rpus by 82%. Meaning that 82% of the words appear in the old text corpus. This shows that word list obtained from a specific source will most likely contain the same words.