I have previously discussed the use of 'pieces' in Brunei English, such as the following from The Brunei Times of 25/12/2011:
The police has seized 12 pieces of $100 notes ...
and also the following from the Borneo Bulletin of 25/10/2011:
We are currently producing about 2,000 pieces pf solid/engineered doors a month.
(Both these are from Deterding & Salbrina, Brunei English, 2013, p. 55.)
In standard English, 'pieces' would be redundant in both these extracts, as 'notes' and 'doors' are both count nouns, and 'pieces' is only used for noncount nouns like 'cheese' or 'advice'.
One possibility to explain the use of 'pieces' with count nouns in Brunei is that it is influenced by measure words in Malay, such as ekor for animals, orang for people, and biji for fruit. (Chinese similarly also has measure words, such as 本 for books and the general-purpose 个.)
Some evidence for the influence of Malay comes from this extract from a leaflet issued by the Ministry of Health:
Note the use of 'pieces' for bananas and also dates, even though these are count nouns in English. The equivalent text in the Malay version is this:
Note that biji is used for all items.
It is not clear why the English version uses 'pieces' for the plural items (bananas and dates) but not for the singular items. Nevertheless, it seems that the English has been influenced by the use of biji in the Malay.
