Language in Brunei

Tautology is the unnecessary repetition of some words. (Well, I'll admit that that sentence might itself be regarded as tautologous − re...

One of my UBD colleagues, Aznah, observed that she sometimes gets mistaken for a student by officials, and then they can be quite brusque in...

As most of my linguistics students at UBD know, an 's' suffix can be pronounced in three different ways: /s/, /z/ or /ɪz/. The final...

In my blog a few days ago ( 7 April 2009 ), I discussed words that can have two opposite meanings. One of the examples I suggested was sanct...

Sometimes words change their meaning quite substantially in context. My dictionary tells me that kental means "curdled". But how ...

Another picture sent me by Ludwig Tan in Singapore is this one: Standard English would have closed , with a 'd' on the end; but the ...

My former colleague at NIE in Singapore, Ludwig Tan, has sent me some splendid photographs that are relevant for pronunciation, and he has g...

Have a look at the picture on the right. At first sight it seems to be a perfect match for the image that we at UBD are trying to project fo...

There is a really interesting illustration of the importance of commas in ensuring that what you write makes sense, submitted by Geoff Pullu...

A weird category of word is one which has two meanings that are almost exact opposites of each other. A classic case in English is sanction ...

Last week, as I was travelling back from the United States, I was waiting for about one hour in Denver airport. There were about 50 other pe...

In previous blogs ( 23 March , 31 March ), I discussed the language use patterns of 40 first-year UBD undergraduates who identified themselv...

In my previous blog ( 23 March ), I discussed a ranking of the best languages of 40 Malay first-year undergraduates at UBD. Here I will show...

At the start of this semester, I got my first-year students to fill in a questionnaire about their language usage. They were asked to list t...

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis contends that we are controlled by the language we speak. It originated from the study of a speaker of the Native...

In my second-year linguistics class at UBD today, I was talking about how English varies around the world. To illustrate the differences bet...

In my blog of yesterday ( 19 March ), I discussed innovative language and code-mixing in a Brunei blog. One of my colleagues asked me if I c...

Language mixing is a fascinating phenomenon; but it is often hard to obtain data. People code-mix and switch all the time, but if you put a ...

I have previously (e.g. 24 February & 25 February ) discussed calques, in which phrases from one language get converted word-for-word i...

I recently saw the following sign in the Temple of Literature in Hanoi: The most obvious question is: what does it mean? Well, the online En...