Processing Malaysian Indigenous Languages
Asmah Haji Omar
University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur

Abstract
Malaysian indigenous languages are of two entirely different families: Austronesian andAustroasiatic. The former consists of Malay and all the languages of Sabah and Sarawak, while the latter the aboriginal languages found only in Peninsular Malaysia. Except for Malay and a few more in Sabah and Sarawak, most of these languages have not been put into writing. This means that no writing system with an orthography has been ascribed to them, despite the fact that quite a number have been described in terms of phonology, morphology and syntax. From the descriptions available, one gets a picture of their typologies and systems for processing purposes.
    Concerning typology, there is not much difference between the two families as far as phonemic inventories go, but there are differences in the phonological structures of the syllable and the word. As for morphology, the Austronesian languages are agglutinative, and the Austroasiatic ones isolative. There is also a difference in the syntactical status of the word, where the former has the two categories of the full word and the particle, and the latter only the full word. This last mentioned difference leads to a divergence between them in the types of phrase, the clause and the complex sentence.

Biodata:
Asmah Haji Omar, Professor Emeritus, is now attached to the Academy of Malay Studies (AMS), University of Malaya (UM). She was formerly , Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor of Malay Linguistics, Director of the Language Centre, and Dean of the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics of the university. After her mandatory retirement from UM, she was invited by the Sultan Idris University of Education, Tanjong Malim, Perak, to occupy the Za'ba Chair of Malay Civilization, and establish the Institute of Malay Civilization (2001 - 2005). After Perak, she returned to the UM to teach and do research at the AMS, and has been there until today. She had been visiting professor/research fellow in many universities, among them being the Mahidol University (Bangkok), University of Hawaii, University of Qatar, Northern University of Illinois, University of Aston in Birmingham, University of Gothenburg (Sweden), and National Institute of Education (Singapore).

As a member of the Language Council of Brunei Darussalam-Indonesia-Malaysia (MABBIM) from its inception in 1972, she has been involved in the development of Malay/Bahasa Indonesia, specifically in the standardization of the spelling system, formulation of rules for the coining of scientific terminology, and method of compiling dictionaries of scientific terms.

She has done extensive fieldwork on indigenous languages of Sarawak and Sabah, as well as the aboriginal languages of Peninsular Malaysia. Her first venture into Sarawak was her research on Iban, which became the subject of her Ph.D. thesis, The Iban Language of Sarawak: A Grammatical Description, submitted to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1969.