Language in Brunei

I have previously mentioned calques, or word-for-word translations across languages, such as the following from English into Malay: kenderaa...

Can you guess which country in Southeast Asia has the highest daily intake of protein per person? The surprising answer is Myanmar; but Brun...

You may have read that Oxford Dictionaries have chosen selfie , a photograph of oneself, to be their word of the year. (For example, see thi...

Taitung City takes great pride in being a pleasant place. They have a saying to describe the place: 好山好水 good mountains good water to whi...

One of the things I did while in Taiwan these past two weeks is turn the television on to a news channel and listen to the news over and ove...

I spent the last two weeks in Taitung, in the east of Taiwan. For me, it was splendid to be surrounded all the time by people speaking Chine...

I was recently doing some translation of a text from Chinese to English, together with my wife, and I translated the following: 你也該努力看看，能不能...

All books have typos. Even my own books have a few, despite my efforts at proof-reading the text again and again and again. And while they c...

I previously discussed ( here ) the fact that Bruneians tend to include themselves when counting their siblings; so if I have one brother an...

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...