Language in Brunei

At 10:02 last night, my student sent me the following message: I'm so sorry, just let u know my assignment I put it in ur piegon hall....

This is the advertising billboard above a busy intersection in BSB, the capital of Brunei: I find it amazing that people can spend so much...

Academic journals are ranked according to an 'Impact Factor'. This is defined as the average number of citations each paper in the j...

In my previous post about recorded messages in the Singapore MRT trains, I discussed pronunciation of 'next station' that deviates f...

In the Singapore MRT trains, the announcements are all pre-recorded using exceptionally precise pronunciation; and the phrase 'next stat...

In my previous post, I discussed an instance when I did not understand someone in Singapore. How about cases when someone did not understand...

I am currently in Singapore. It is interesting for me to consider times when I don't understand something, and also instances when they ...

I wonder if the word majoriti has a shifted meaning from its source word 'majority'. Here is an extract from an article on page M9 ...

Here's one of the weirdest signs I have seen in Brunei. Let's now have a look at the wider picture, to see where these signs are p...

I have been working on the pronunciation of the indigenous languages of Brunei, hoping to make recordings available for people to listen to....

Rhoticity involves producing the [r] sound whenever 'r' occurs in the spelling, including at the end of words such as 'car' ...

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...