Language in Brunei

There is an MRT station in Singapore called Woodleigh, and a former student just wrote to me asking me how it should be pronounced. There se...

This is the inside of an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, called +39. (Apparently, 39 is the international dialing code for Italy.) The pizz...

Yesterday, while my wife (who is from Taiwan) was talking about the poor teaching in a particular university, she said: They are too busy to...

In my previous post, I discussed the occurrence of fruits , specifically whether the plural noun might occur in Inner-Circle countries such ...

I have previously discussed the use plural nouns such as fruits for logically countable things, something that I believe will become part o...

I am currently in Melbourne for a couple of weeks. I have heard an expression that seems unusual: What are you loving at the moment? (said b...

Here is a sign in a shop selling film CDs: In Britain or the USA, pieces would be omitted, because CD is a count noun. But use of pieces f...

I just read an on-line article about the ten most lucrative languages to learn ( here ). The list is: Chinese Japanese French Arabic Swahili...

In my previous post, I mentioned the work I am doing on misunderstandings in the English used by people from different backgrounds. I am cur...

At the moment, I am doing some work on misunderstandings in conversational speech, specifically to try and work out what features of pronunc...

I have one final observation about the ELF conference in Hong Kong that I discussed in my previous two postings. Jennifer Jenkins told me th...

In my previous post, I mentioned the recent ELF conference in Hong Kong. During the conference, I attended an interesting panel session with...

I am currently in Hong Kong, at a conference on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) organised by the Hong Kong Institute of Education. It's...

There is an interesting article in the on-line Guardian of 18 May 2011 ( here ) in which the author, Tom Meltzer, took a course designed to ...

See if you can guess what items are most often smuggled into Brunei. Alcohol is an obvious guess, given that its sale is forbidden in Brunei...

Have a look at this extract from an article on page 13 of the Borneo Bulletin of 13 May 2011. Note how crews is used as a plural noun, whe...

I am currently watching a Malay film called Stilleto . One notable feature is the degree of mixing and switching between Malay and English. ...

The government of Brunei is currently implementing a population census. The letter accompanying the census form is printed on one side in Ma...

If you accidentally dropped something, what would you say? I think I might say something like: "Oops, I dropped it!" (Well, all ri...

Apparently, some royal prince is getting married soon in the UK. I am afraid I have no interest in the event, though it seems that lots of p...