Sketch Engine can handle texts in any language including languages which are not supported explicitly. The number of available features depends on the script the language uses. Scripts divide into whitespace scripts and non-whitespace ones.
A whitespace script separates words with a space, paragraph or a similar character appearing as white space on the screen or in print. Typical examples are languages written in Latin, Cyrillic or Arabic scripts. Many scripts of India also belong to this category.
A non-whitespace script is a script that does not use whitespace, typical examples are Chinese, Japanese or Thai. Texts in these scripts transliterated into whitespace scripts can make use of the same functionality as whitespace scripts.
Available features
| whitespace script | non-whitespace script | |
|---|---|---|
| automatic tokenization | YES, with a universal tokenizer | NO *) |
| automatic lemmatization | NO *) | NO *) |
| automatic POS tagging | NO *) | NO *) |
| concordance search | YES at word level or character level, regex allowed NO *) lemma search or POS search | YES but only at character level, regex allowed, a concordance for a string of characters can be generated, no other searches are available *) |
| collocations | YES can be calculated from a concordance or via word sketches | NO *) |
| word lists | YES | NO *) |
| Word Sketch | YES, universal word sketch grammar will be used, users can write their own word sketch grammar to suit their needs | NO *) |
| thesaurus | YES | NO *) |
| Create corpus from the web | YES **) | YES **) |
*) If the user uploads a vertical text which is already tokenized, lemmatized and POS-tagged using external tools, all features will be supported.
**) more information about creating a corpus in an unsupported language on the corpus building page.
Is Sketch Engine suitable for my language?
The best way is to set up a free trial access, upload the texts and try how searching your corpus works. Please get in touch if you have any questions related to unsupported languages. Our support team will do their best to accommodate your requirements.
