In the last eight years I have used Mathematica quite a lot for doing Natural Language Processing and text mining. Here are couple of links that describe such activities:

[1] "Statistical thesaurus from NPR podcasts" : http://mathematicaforprediction.wordpress.com/2013/10/15/statistical-thesaurus-from-npr-podcasts/

[2] "Natural language processing with functional parsers" http://mathematicaforprediction.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/natural-language-processing-with-functional-parsers/

Both blog posts have links to Mathematica packages and guides for doing NLP.

The approaches in those links are more-or-less language agnostic. I have used them to make search engines that combine (i) English, Spanish, and French, and (ii) English and Malay.

You might find this discussion interesting, "Convergence of synonym networks" : http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/227651 .

As for your question: "Let's say I'd want to separate the syllables of Spanish... would that be doable here?" I have not used separate syllables of Spanish, only appropriate stemmers.