Language in Brunei

SPN stands for Sistem Pendidikan Negara ('National Education System'), and SPN21 is the new education system for the 21st century t...

I find the material in the "Have Your Say" section of BruDirect fascinating, as it offers a window onto how language is used in Br...

Because Brunei Malay is not usually written down, the spelling is sometimes uncertain. This particularly affects an unstressed syllable near...

I have previously discussed (eg 20 Feb 09 ) the work of Jennifer Jenkins, and her insistence that speakers of English in places such as Brun...

In my previous post, I discussed a paper from a recent conference on English in South-East Asia that was held in Manila last week. Another i...

Last week, I was at a conference on English in South-East Asia in Manila, and there were many interesting papers, some of which I would like...

In a previous blog ( 22 Oct, 'pieces' ), I discussed the use of pieces with a count noun like apples , suggesting the distinction b...

On page 4 of the Media Permata of 21/22 November 2009, there is a report of efforts by Brunei Shell Petroleum to raise road safety as part ...

In my blog of 28 October, I mentioned the dictionary of Brunei Malay I have bought; and in my blog of 4 November, I discussed some issues re...

In my previous blog, I mentioned the dictionary of Brunei Malay that I recently bought. Some of the entries are worth considering. Have a lo...

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...