Its defintely not wasted time to try linguistic analysis with Perl, but quit hard to answer your question, because we do not know your approach. Are you going to do analysis with handcoded rules or do you prefer an statistcal approach?

A good start for statistical language processing may be Dan Melamed's collection of linguistic tools. An TPJ article on Perl and Morphology may be of interest as well.

If you end up with really huge regular expressions it may be the time to implement an automata in C or whatever, but Perl is a great tool to produce linguistic prototypes.

If you want to do research with Hidden Markov Models, try HTK for a non Perl start.

Hanamaki