Language in Brunei

While I was in Singapore, I visited the Gardens by the Bay. This is what the super-trees look like at night: I know we are supposed to be i...

Just recently, I was in Singapore for a few days. The breakfast in the place I was staying offered 'vegetarian water' and 'veget...

Here's a phonological puzzle for you. Consider the pronunciation of the following words of English: wag swagger wacky quack swanky swan ...

The cupertino effect is when a word gets changed by an over-enthusiastic spell checker. The term derives from early spell checkers convertin...

In a previous posting ( here ), I discussed abbreviations found in Malay reference materials such as dictionaries, and I suggested that the ...

I love crash blossoms (newspaper headlines that are easily mis-parsed on first reading). Here is one I saw in today's BBC World News si...

A never event is a medical term for an event that should not have happened. According Wikipedia , never events are 'inexcusable outcome...

In my previous post, I discussed whether texting might be harmful to literacy. The view among many linguists is that the creative and playfu...

Did you know that, in 2010, the average American teenager sent over 3000 text messages per month? ( See here ). That means about 100 message...

Mixing between English and Malay is the norm in informal language in Brunei. As an example, see this sentence from Tiger Lim's blog , ta...

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 ...