Language in Brunei

I recently saw the word kesalingbolehtukaran ('interchangeability') in a newspaper article discussing the currencies of Brunei and ...

When discussing the English of places like Singapore and Brunei, we tend to say Singapore English and Brunei English . In contrast, if we ...

An early European visitor to Brunei was Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian scholar who travelled on Ferdinand Magellan's voyage around the...

When I record students in order to analyse their pronunciation, I always ask the question 'What did you do in your last vacation'. ...

Brunei is going through the BA? series for vehicle registrations, and it is interesting to note which combinations are skipped. BAD was omi...

The Streisand Effect is the situation when attempts to stop something being circulated are counterproductive, as the attempts themselves ser...

When I was younger, we used to talk about boyfriends and girlfriends. Instead, young people nowadays seem to talk about their partners. Whic...

A 'crash blossom' is a headline which is hard to parse because of the syntax. (For the origin of the term, see Wikipedia .) I just ...

Last week, I was briefly in the UK, and by good fortune, it was the first day at school for my grandson, Oliver. Here he is coming out from ...

In my previous post, I discussed blends in Malay such as cerpen ('short story') and tadika ('kindergarten'), and I raised ...

In my introductory linguistics course this week, I mentioned blends such as smog (= smoke + fog ) and motel (= motor + hotel ), where a ...

Suppose I said the following: I have always been happy until now. Do you think I am still happy? In my variety of English, this would mean ...

In my previous post, I discussed the pronunciation of the vowel in the second syllable of tasik ('lake'), specifically that it may ...

These two signs are at different places along the Tasik Lama to Markucing forest trail. Note the variable spelling of tasik ('lake'...

I saw this cartoon on page 24 of The Brunei Times of 5 August 2012: Clearly, the photographer doesn't know any phonetics. The reason w...

In my previous post, I discussed the difference between anak yatim and orphan . My UBD colleague, Adrian Clynes , suggested a similar issue...

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...