Language in Brunei

My new book, Misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca: An Analysis of ELF Interactions in South-East Asia , has now been published by...

I saw this sign on a display board that is being installed at UBD: This raises two questions: What does 'being original colour coming al...

Something I find constantly amazing is how bad English is at differentiating crucially important words. For example, the numbers 'fifty...

I just saw this sign outside a construction site near Jalan Muara. ( Awas means 'caution'.) It would be more standard to have '...

I just looked at a splendid new resource that shows the change in forest cover across the world between 2000 and 2012 ( here ). Below is a ...

In English, blends usually involve the first half of one word and the second half of another: 'smoke' + 'fog' = 'smog...

The Brunei Times daily synopsis of the news ( here ) offers some splendid material for comparative linguistics because it has the same repor...

I have previously discussed the occurrence of tautologous expressions in Malay ( see here ). In a test for my fourth year UBD module on tra...

On page 54 of my book on Brunei English ( see here ), I list the following examples of 'one of' followed by a singular noun: one of...

I have one older sister, one younger brother and one younger sister. In other words, I am the second of four in my family. So, how many sibl...

The Standard Malay for 'baby' is bayi . However, this word is never used in Brunei, as bayi means 'pig' in Brunei Malay. In...

I recently bought a Samsung Smart Phone. OK, so maybe that's not the smartest thing for an old fogey like me to do. But, hey, you've...

I have previously discussed uncertainty over spelling in Malay, particularly the use of 'i' or 'e' in the second syllable of...

Reading English football news in a Malay newspaper can be quite challenging. Take this extract from page 22 of the Media Permata of 12 Octo...

A rather common word in spoken Malay nowadays is the conjunction so , borrowed from the English word. I haven't seen it in any dictionar...

The phonology of Malay has a rule of vowel harmony: if the vowel in the first syllable of a bisyllabic word is /e/, then the second syllable...

We usually claim that stress is a transitive verb, so there is no need for a preposition such as on between stress and its object. And, on...

I have previously discussed calques, where a phrase is translated word-for-word from one language into another. Calques seem to be rather co...

Sometimes I can only understand something written in Malay by first translating it word-for-word into English. For example, in an article on...

This is an extract from an article on page 1 of Media Permata of 7 September 2013 about a titah by HM the Sultan of Brunei, who has been a...