Language in Brunei

One of my problems with this blog is allowing you to hear extracts of speech. While I can make pictures and videos available, speech seems t...

In my previous post, I discussed the number of monophthong vowels in Brunei Malay and suggested there are just three: /i, a, u/. How about ...

How many vowels are there in Brunei Malay? The simple answer is: three. /i/, /a/, /u/. However, things are not quite so simple. Indeed, the...

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...