Language in Brunei

It is not straightforward to leave comments on my blog. I know that, as a few people have told me that they have given up in frustration. I ...

I just read an article in the online Guardian ( here ), discussing how the army in Britain is planning to cut 20,000 jobs. At the same time ...

In a previous post ( here ), I discussed word spacing in the local Malay newspaper, and I suggested that the occasional absence of spacing o...

My wife, being Chinese, has some ideas about food that are a bit strange to me. She believes that the shape and colour of food indicates wha...

The American Dialect Society is currently voting on its selection for Word of the Year. You can see the list of candidates here . There are ...

For someone like me who is trying to learn Malay, especially when I have so few oppourtunities to actually speak the language in Brunei, one...

Yesterday I attended the welcoming speech by the Vice Chancellor of UBD to the new intake of students. The first few minutes were entirely i...

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...