Language in Brunei

Something I find very difficult to understand is why Bruneians so often confuse 'preceding' and 'following'. For example: ...

I am currently reading written assignments by my students, and I regularly come across features of their writing such as the following: ...

Words tend to be longer in Malay than in English. This is partly because English has lots of short words, like 'a', 'of', ...

In English, blends are usually formed from the first half of one word and the second half of another. For example: smog : smoke + fog mot...

In Malay, nearly all roots are bisyllabic. There are a few exceptions; but monosyllabic roots tend to add an extra syllable when there is a ...

I have previously had a debate with John Wells over the pronunciation of the vowel in the first syllable of words such as 'albatross...

Brunei Malay is almost never written (though that now may be changing with the widespread use of Brunei Malay in social media — perhaps it n...

In my two previous posts, I have been discussing my experiences in Pekanbaru, where I was a guest of Universitas Islam Riau last week. After...

On the second day of my visit to Pekanbaru, I was a keynote speaker at the ISELLA 2017 conference (International Seminar on Education, Langu...

Last week, I was in Kotabaru, the capital city of Riau Province on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. I was invited as a keynote speaker at a...

New car registrations in Brunei begin with BA, and then the next letter increases by one every six months. So we had BAP, BAQ, BAR ... Howe...

In my previous two posts, I have been discussing material from a paper on English as a Medium of Instruction that I have recently published,...

In the paper I discussed in my previous post, we investigated the medium of instruction at UBD, which is supposed to be a bilingual universi...

Malay names in publications always cause a problem. Publishers insist on knowing what the surname is; and Malays do not have surnames. This ...

This is the sign above a shop in Brunei Airport: For me, 'candy' is a noncount noun. Is it following similar non-count nouns such ...

This is the departure concourse at Brunei International Airport: While you can buy things such as food, clothes, jewellery, watches, choco...

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...