Language in Brunei

I sometimes see students write sentences like this: Every student must remember to bring his book. I believe that it is inappropriate to use...

There's a curious phenomenon in the local Malay language newspaper of sometimes allowing words to be printed with almost no space betwee...

In my previous post, I discussed confusion over the meaning of 'fasting', specifically whether it involves abstaining from drinking ...

Recently, I had to undergo a procedure in the hospital, and I was told that I should fast on the day of the procedure, from 1 pm onwards. No...

There is a cartoon called Penny and Aggie where the two main characters have just started university, and it tracks their experiences in att...

This is the headline and picture from an article on page 9 of Media Permata of 9 December 2011: The headline says: 'Mata-Mata junction ...

I have been developing a webpage ( here ) on the Pronunciation of Malay, built around a paper I wrote together with my UBD colleague, Adrian...

I have been watching a Malay film called Putar Alam . Some of the characters, particularly the sophisticated, modern women, seem to use Engl...

In my previous posting, I discussed the contrast between wholly (with a double /l/) and holy (with a single /l/), and I suggested that in ...

In a recent Phonetics Blog , John Wells transcribed wholly as /həʊlli/, and the double ('geminate') /l/ surprised me. But checking ...

I am just grading an exam paper. One question includes the following: In the following sentence, the word died occurs. Often, we use a euph...

My UBD colleague, Salbrina Sharbawi, tells me that the Brunei Malay word gigiran means 'to blurt out random words when startled'. (...

In my previous post, I discussed the pronunciation of biopic , specifically whether the stress is on the first or second syllable. Failure t...

How do you pronounce biopic ? I always assumed it would be stressed on the second syllable, because it has a final -ic suffix, which general...

In my previous posting, I discussed an allusion to 42, and the fact that none of my students in Brunei have heard of The Hitchhiker's Gu...

I was just reading a post in Linguist List ( here ) discussing the issue of making data available and thereby allowing research to be checke...

In Malay, we often find calques ('loan translations') from English. Examples include: kenderaan pacuan empat roda ('four wheel ...

The Chairman LOL website ( here ) mostly features funny translations into English from Chinese. But there are also a few photos from other l...

The following headline occurred on the front page of the Media Permata of 29 October 2011, introducing a news item about companies that app...

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, UBD published a booklet with lots of interesting photographs, including this aerial view of the campus: U...