Language in Brunei

I just read in the newspaper that Simon Cowell hopes one day to win an Oscar. Well, I am hoping to win a Nobel Prize. I have no idea which ...

Why is the Malay word biskut ('biscuit') rather than biskit ? If it were derived from the pronunciation of the English word, it sho...

I was just listening to a recording of a Bruneian female talking to a Chinese female. In it, the Bruneian asks what the Chinese did when she...

I just saw the announcement on Amazon of my book Brunei English: A New Variety in a Multilingual Society, written together with my colleagu...

This post has nothing to do with language, but never mind. Here is a picture of the bougainvillea in the window-balcony outside the guest be...

There is a great fondness for paired expressions in Malay, otherwise known as lexical doublets. On page 5 of the Media Permata of 13 March ...

It is interesting to compare sentence length in English and Malay. Here is the final paragraph in an article from page 3 of Media Permata o...

There has recently been lots of attention to work by a Yale professor called Keith Chen who claims that the use of a future tense in a socie...

This morning, I heard on the radio a report that the authorities in Malaysia are trying to promote the use of the words maging ('carniv...

Looking up words in a Malay dictionary can be problematic, as you have to identify the root of the word. I was reminded of this just a coupl...

On Sunday, a bunch of us from the Brunei Nature Society and the UBD club 1stopBrunei went to the Teraja Waterfall near Labi. It was a splend...

Here a picture of the sunset from my apartment in Brunei. There's a story from Chinese philosophy that goes like this: There was once ...

There is a tension in Malay between indigenous vocabulary and words borrowed from English. So, for example, one finds both kegiatan and akt...

Here's a story from the Analects of Confucius (论语): There were a bunch of frogs sitting at the base of a wall. They had heard that ther...

In England, we have certain spoken routines for children. For example: Parent: What do you say when someone gives you something? Answer: T...

This is from page 10 of the Borneo Bulletin of 8 January 2013, quoting from the welcoming speech for the new intake of students given by the...

The modern-day extra-long noun-phrase build-up phenomenon for newspaper headlines has been observed for articles in English ( see here ). So...

However often I read the Malay newspaper, I still find it hard to parse text where the words are compacted together with little space betwee...

A colleague asked me: what is meant in English by 'Digital Image Processing'? Is it the digital processing of images (i.e. 'digi...

In my last two posts, I have been discussing common phrases in English (such as 'freezing cold') and how they can be said quite fast...