Language in Brunei

I recently managed to buy a Brunei Malay dictionary (shown on the right) from the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in BSB. It is Brunei Malay to Sta...

In English, count nouns refer to things that are countable, such as books and pens, while mass nouns refer to uncountable things, like coffe...

In my blog of 29 September , I discussed the neutralisation of /i,e/ and also /u,o/ in closed final syllables in Malay (i.e. syllables with ...

We usually describe morphemes such as dis- , un- and in- as prefixes: they cannot occur on their own as they are only found attached to st...

In my previous posting, I discussed the vowel in the third syllable of kebersehan . In fact, use of 'e' or 'i' in the closed...

Have a look at this sign, by the side of a road near the centre of BSB, the capital of Brunei. It means "Take care of cleanliness"...

In my previous blog, I mentioned the strange confusion between oral and aural . In fact, there are lots of words in English which are prono...

One of the basic requirements of language is to differentiate concepts, especially things which may be confusable. So why is it that for man...

There was recently a discussion on the Language Log site of a cartoon by Jems ( Language Log ). From a linguistic point of view, there are t...

In phonemic analysis, we say that a single phoneme, such as /l/, can often be pronounced in different ways, and we call each of these varian...

In my previous posting, based on the recent research of Paolo Caluzzi, I discussed the status of various minority languages in Brunei and su...

Last night, I went to a fascinating talk by my UBD colleague, Paolo Coluzzi, about the status of the Iban and Murut languages in Temburong, ...

Standard Brunei Malay is similar to Standard Malay in Malaysia and Singapore, but not identical. Here I will focus on pronunciation. Two are...

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...