Language in Brunei

In my previous post, I discussed the pronunciation of 'monk' by our guide in Bhutan. In this picture, he is on the left, wearing tra...

Last week, I was in Bhutan. It was brilliant. While climbing up to the Tiger's Nest temple (see above), at one point we were walking beh...

In my previous post, I highlighted one of the chapters contributed by a student in our new book, The Use and Status of Language in Brunei Da...

In my previous post, I discussed the quandary I had in preparing a News Item for our Faculty website − specifically, whether to feature pict...

In my previous post, I discussed the tendency for local news reports to highlight the participation of members of the Royal Family or other ...

On page 1 of Media Permata of 18 November 2016, there are the following two pictures with a four-line caption below them, describing the pe...

On page 13 of the Media Permata of 18 November, there is a short article (sourced from the Malaysian Bernama organisation) with the heading...

The Streisand Effect describes a situation where efforts to prevent access to data have the opposite effect and actually increase access to ...

I have previously mentioned the frequent occurrence of Malay-English initialisms in Brunei (e.g. here ). Here are some Malay-English initial...

Just like most universities around the world, academics at UBD are judged by their publications, and in particular by the number of times th...

I was listening to the midday news on RTB Nasional FM today, and once again I heard Calais pronounced as /kʌlaɪs/ rather than the expected /...

I have sometimes previously discussed the tension between use of a native word of Malay and an equivalent borrowed word (e.g. petua vs. ...

My granddaughter, Elsie, aged 5 and a half, loves to write. Here is a little story she wrote on yellow stick-it sheets while we were visitin...

Faux Amis ('false friends') are words that involve a shift in meaning after they have been borrowed from one language to another. Or...

At the UBD Convocation yesterday, I was interested to hear how many English words occurred in the Sultan's titah , which you would expec...

This is a picture drawn by my granddaughter, Elsie, aged 6. Note how she spells Grandma and Grandpa. She is following the way she says the w...

In my phonetics class yesterday, I asked my students to transcribe 'complicated'; and half of them used /æ/ instead of /eɪ/ in the t...

I've previously mentioned the problem of adjectives and verbs ending in 'c'. If you want to add 'ed' or 'ing' to...

In the new Gadong Health Centre, the walls of the waiting rooms are decorated with pictures and advice on healthy eating, ways to protect yo...

My Malay dictionary tells me that platform is a word in Malay. But how is it pronounced? I have often heard it said with an initial /f/ by...