Mixing in BruDirect

I find the material in the "Have Your Say" section of BruDirect fascinating, as it offers a window onto how language is used in Brunei. In particular, the mix of English and Malay is interesting: even in the English-medium section, there is regular use of Malay, and in the Malay-medium section, there is a lot of English as well.

This seems to confirm that Brunei really is becoming a bilingual society, and (at least for those who are computer literate), it is expected that people should be able to understand both these languages.

To investigate the extent of mixing, I looked at the language used in ten separate discussion threads where the original posting was in English and there were ten or more contributions in each thread. I then classified each of these contributions as:

• E : English only
• M : Malay only
• E(M) : English with some Malay
• M(E) : Malay with some English
• E+M : an even mix of the two languages

The results of the 143 contributions are shown below.


It can be seen that there are about the same number of English-dominated contributions (66) as Malay-dominated ones (64).

These figures confirm that mixing between the two languages is extremely common in an Internet forum such as BruDirect.