Language in Brunei

The Wikipedia page on Kedayan ( here ) claims it is "the de facto national language of Brunei", which is rather startling, as mos...

Here's a paragraph from page 1 of the Media Permata of 23 May, 2018: Najib, yang juga Anggota Parlimen Pekan, mengesahkan perkara itu ...

I have always claimed that blends in English tend to combine the first half of one word with the second half of another: 'smog' = sm...

I was just listening to a Titah (speech) by HM Sultan of Brunei to celebrate Brunei's 34th National Day. What is splendid about this tit...

The Malay promoted in Brunei is based on that of Malaysia; but being close to Indonesia, it may be influenced by Bahasa Indonesia to a certa...

I was recently asked to review a paper for a journal, and the final page of the PDF document has the header 'Page 41 of 40', which i...

Originally, Malay had no /f/, so /f/ only occurs in borrowed words such as faham ('understand') and fikir ('think') from A...

'Schadenfreude' is one of my favourite words of English. It means: pleasure gained from the misery of others. Like that feeling you ...

I went out with my daughter for a meal, and I asked, "Is your food hot?", to which she replied, "Oh, I love spicy food."...

Autoantonyms are words with two directly opposite meanings. For example, 'sanction' is an autoantonym, because it can mean "to ...

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...