Malay is one of the many languages whose text corpora are included in Sketch Engine, a tool
for discovering how language works. Sketch Engine is designed for linguists, lexicologists,
lexicographers, researchers, translators, terminologists, teachers and students working with
Malay to easily discover what is typical and frequent in the language and to notice
phenomena which would go unnoticed without a large sample of Malay text.

Sketch Engine has tools to identify and analyse collocations, synonyms and antonyms, examples of
use in context, keywords or terms. Frequency word lists of Malay single-word or multi-word
expressions of various types can be generated. Even users without any technical knowledge can
create their own Malay corpus using the Sketch Engine's intuitive built-in tool.

Tools to work with Malay text corpora

To work with the Malay language, Sketch Engine offers the following tools:

Malay Word Sketch

Word Sketch is the easiest way to get an at-a-glance overview of a
word’s behaviour. Collocations are displayed in categorized lists to identify strong and weak
collocates easily. more»

Available Word Sketches for user corpora:
Full-featured Sketch grammar.

Word Sketch difference will compare two word sketches and will indicate
which collocates tend to combine with one word or the other. The information can be used to avoid
mistakes in word choice or to study the differences between two words with a similar meaning.
more»

Malay concordance

The concordancer included in Sketch Engine can be used to display a list
of examples (called concordance) of the search word or phrase as it appears in Malay
language text corpora. The search will display the keyword with some context to the right and
context to the left of the keyword (KWIC concordance).
more»

Malay thesaurus

The thesaurus is a feature that automatically generates a list of
words similar in meaning to the keyword.
more»

Malay word lists

The word list feature will generate a frequency list of all words that
appear in a text or corpus. A very large corpus can be used to generate a list of all words that
exist in Malay or all words that start, contain or end with specific characters. Advanced
options can be used to generate lists of grammatical categories or parts of speech used in a corpus
together with their frequencies. more»

N-grams in Malay

Generating a list of N-grams contained in a text makes it possible to
identify and study patterns and notice phenomena related to multi-word units (MWU) in Malay
that cannot be detected by other tools. more»

List of available Malay corpora

  • trial – available to both trial users as well as paying subscribers
  • main – only available to paying subscribers
  • on demand – access to the corpus is subject to specific terms, click the
    corpus name for details
Corpus Access policy Size in words
Malay Web 2020 (msTenTen20) main 296,419,465
Malay Web 2024 (msTenTen24) trial 805,094,746
Malaysian Web (MalaysianWaC) trial 182,578,743
OpenSubtitles 2018 parallel – Malay main 13,465,077