Identification of Closely Related Indigenous Languages: An Orthographic Approach

The main focus of this study is to identify the closely related languages amongst the indigenous languages of Sarawak and major languages such as Bahasa Melayu and English. The indigenous languages involved in this study include Iban (standard), Bidayuh (Bau-Jagoi), Kelabit (Bario), Melanau (Matu-Daro), Sa´ban (Long Banga) and Penan (East Baram). The relationship between the languages is established via the proportion of cognates in the Swadesh list of the language pairs. The orthographic approach, which primarily examines the spelling of the vocabulary words, is used. The outcome of this study reveals that some indigenous languages are more closely related to to Bahasa Melayu than others. The findings from this research serve as an initial solution to answer the greater challenges in computational linguistics, such as the use of closely related languages as Pivot solutions in problems related to the under-resourced languages.