Language in Brunei

I was reminded of the difficulties of using a Malay dictionary when I tried to look up pengecas . To use a Malay dictionary, you need to id...

In today's tutorial, Ishamina Athirah asked her students whether 'creativity' can have a plural: 'creativities'. All h...

When I teach phonetic transcription, I tell my students that all syllables must have one vowel and only one vowel. (I include a schwa in the...

In a recent post, I mentioned my surprise to see my picture in the newspaper as a result of my recent trip to Turkey. Here it is again, in t...

I was listening to a news report about the search for the crashed Air Asia plane, and when I heard the Indonesian official mention the '...

I constantly find it amazing how many times my photo turns up in the newspapers. There was even a recent report in the Borneo Bulletin ( he...

I really don't understand the logic of the spelling of English words borrowed into Malay. If 'th' becomes 't' (as in tem...

My trip to Turkey was on a tour with about 40 people, too many for a single bus. So we split into two: one for Chinese people, with a Chines...

An oxymoron is a contradiction in terms, such as 'deafening silence'. I saw this sign outside the ancient Roman city of Ephesus in T...

I just spent ten days on a tour of Turkey. It was brilliant. One of the new words I learned while there was 'selfie stick', the ext...

A Bruneian colleague was talking to me today about her research, and she consistently said 'aDULT' (with the stress on the second sy...

Here's a map of South-east Asia, showing levels of corruption (from the Independent ). Australia in the bottom right is yellow, so it fa...

There is a belief by some people that code-switching is a sign of linguistic weakness, and that speakers mix their languages because they ar...

An 'eggcorn' is the substitution of a word based on similarity in the speaker's pronunciation in order to make sense of a phrase...

This morning, a colleague sent me this message: As a data freak, I thought you might be interested in this alert sent to me by Nature. So,...

When I find something in Malay I don't understand, sometimes I try translating it into English to see if that helps. Today I saw sehenti...

A few days ago, one of my colleagues told me that he was stealing some of my ideas to use in his class. I replied that if he stole somethin...

In recent posts, I have discussed the pronunciation of words borrowed from English into Malay, especially those with 'g' or 'a...

Most words that are borrowed from English to Malay and have /æ/ in the English are spelled with 'e' rather than 'a' in Malay...

Something I don't understand is why some English words borrowed into Malay retain a 'g' while others do not. For example, agenda...