Language in Brunei

My UBD colleague, Malai Ayla , asked me this question: what is the English for the Malay term anak yatim ? My dictionary shows this: Howeve...

I am currently in the UK, playing with my two grandchildren, Oliver aged 4 and Elsie aged 2. I only see them once a year, so each time I see...

Yesterday I attended the viva examination for Noor Fadhilah Mat Nayan at the University of Reading. Her thesis is on the intonation of Engli...

The pile-up of nouns in newspaper headlines is notorious. But I find this sub-headline from today's on-line Guardian article about the b...

This post has nothing to do with Brunei. But it's something I thought was interesting, so never mind. I just saw this paragraph in an a...

On the forest trail between Bukit Karamunting and Tasek Lama, there are two wasai ('waterfalls') named after two residents of Kampu...

The Malay for long-sighted is rabun dekat (lit. 'blind close') and for short-sighted it is rabun jauh (lit. 'blind far'). ...

I was just reading a BBC article about the financial situation in Europe ( here ), and there were two instances of teh (instead of the ) in...

I was just reading that sort of is three times more common in British English than American English, while kind of is five times more comm...

In my previous post, I discussed the spelling pronunciation in Malay of Budapest with [f] instead of [p] at the start of the final syllable....

The pronunciation of names in different languages is always interesting. The morning, on the 8:00 RTB radio news, I heard the announcer stat...

For a lifelong Chelsea supporter such as me, last night was a bit special. It's not just that we finally won the thing; it was the way w...

This is the label my UBD colleague Adrian Clynes noticed on the back of his jacket. Artly doesn't seem like a good word in English. Bu...

One feature of New Varieties of English, such as those of Singapore and Brunei, is sporadic lack of subject-verb agreement. A factor that so...

Here is a sign at the entrance to the Belimbing Recreational Park along Jalan Subok. It is a bit surprising that people can spend lots of m...

I have previously discussed lexical repetition, sometimes involving one term in English followed by the equivalent in Malay. Here is another...

The word walkaton ('walkathon') gets used quite often in Malay, as in this extract from page 2 of Media Permata of 23 April 2012: ...

I recently wrote a book review in which I included the statement: ... provides an historical perspective on the promotion of English in Indi...

In a previous post ( here ), I discussed doublets in Malay such as berhati-hati dan berwaspada ('careful and cautious'), where the ...

On the whole, Malay spelling is predictable: you can determine the spelling of a word from its pronunciation; and you can predict the pronun...