Autoantonyms

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

Another word in this category is 'left': it can mean "departed" ('The man left') or it can mean "stayed" ('There's only one man left'). In fact, this can give rise to potentially ambiguous utterances with two directly contradictory meanings. For example:

There's only one man who's left.

which could mean one man departed or one man stayed behind. This is because 's' could be the weak form of 'has' or of 'is'.

Interestingly, this confusion is unlikely to occur in somewhere like Brunei, in which the weak worm of 'has' almost never occurs. Sometimes avoiding weak forms can help in maintaining intelligibility and avoiding misunderstandings.

preceding / following

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

• in the phrase 'one hot afternoon', a student said she uttered [f] in 'hot' because of the 'f' in the preceding word; but the 'f' is in the following word, not the preceding word;
• in the phrase 'my same mother', a student claimed that 'same mother' was followed by 'my'

I can't find any reason to explain this confusion.

majority, would

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

• 'majority' with no preceding article: 'Majority of the participants are Malays.' (In my language, I would include 'a' or 'the' before 'majority'.)
• 'would' to indicate generalised future: 'The description would be based on acoustic analysis.' (For me, 'would' indicates something hypothetical, so no acoustic analysis was actually done. I would have to use 'will' in this sentence.)

Given that these features of writing seem to be normal in Brunei English, should I leave them? Or should I correct them?

I tend to correct them, on the basis that my students need to develop standard usage for their future careers. But I acknowledge that this is inconsistent with a World Englishes perspective, in which we accept regional variation.

My own approach is that I tolerate, even celebrate, variation in pronunciation, but written English should conform to international standards. But I am not sure that this viewpoint is really tenable. I suspect that use of 'would' as a variant of 'will' is becoming the norm throughout the world, and it is only a few traditionalists like me who insist that 'would' indicates something hypothetical.

Word length in Malay and English

Words tend to be longer in Malay than in English. This is partly because English has lots of short words, like 'a', 'of', 'to', and 'by', while Malay has fewer. The only common two-letter words in Malay are ke ('to') and di ('at'). At the same time, Malay has more prefixes and suffixes than English, so Malay words can be quite long.

The claim that Malay has longer words than English can easily be checked by comparing two similar texts. Here, I compare the words in the North Wind and the Sun text with its Malay equivalent, Angin Utahar dan Matahari (see here). The average word length in the Malay text is 6.64 letters, while the average word length in the English text is 4.22 letters, and this difference is highly significant (t=7.48, df=189, p<0.0001). A chart showing the distribution of the word lengths is shown here:

From this, we can see that while two- and three-letter words are common in English, they are rare in Malay. In contrast, there are lots of Malay words with 6, 7 and 8 letters, but few in English.

tongsis

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

• smog : smoke + fog
• motel : motor + hotel
• edutainment : education + entertainment

In contrast, in Malay blends tend to be the first half of two words, or sometimes three. For example:

• cerpen ('short story') : cerita + pendek
• tadika ('kindergarten') : taman + didik + kanak

However, I just learned one that seems to follow the English pattern, not the usual Malay pattern, though maybe it only exists in Indonesia:

• tongsis ('selfie stick') : tongkat + narsis (lit. 'a narcisist stick')

I wonder if this use of the second part of 'narsis' is influenced by the fact that this word comes from English? Or maybe Indonesian word formation works differently from that of Malay.

mengetahui

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 prefix, empasising the bisyllabic expectation for roots. For example:

• cap ('stamp') becomes mengecap ('to stamp'), not *mencap
• cat ('paint') becomes pengecat ('painter'), not *pencat
• sah ('valid') becomes mengesahkan ('to confirm'), not *menyahkan

Note that baik ('good') and laut ('sea') are bisyllabic, so there is no need for this extra syllable:

• baik ('good') becomes membaiki ('to improve'), not *mengebaiki
• laut ('sea') becomes pelaut ('sailor'), not *pengelaut

However, I have no explanation why tahu ('to know') becomes mengetahui ('to know') rather than the expected *menahui. Why is the extra syllable added? Perhaps there is a feeling that tahu is monosyllabic, as the /h/ is weak (or sometimes omitted).

Alfie

I have previously had a debate with John Wells over the pronunciation of the vowel in the first syllable of words such as 'albatross' and 'balcony'. For me, these words have /ʌ/, so the vowel is the same as in 'bulk' or the first syllable of 'vulgar'; but all dictionaries, including the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, show the vowel as /æ/.

I have always claimed that this is a sound change in progress, but that nobody has yet documented it. After all, it is not surprising if the voal becomes more back before a dark /l/ — the same process happened to the vowel in words such as 'walk' and 'calm'.

However, now I am not so sure. Yesterday, I was reading a book to my 9-year-old grandson, Oliver, and the book included the name 'Alfie'. After a while, Oliver said, "Grandpa, it's /ælfi/ not /ʌlfi/."

So, maybe I am wrong. If even my 9-year-old grandson corrects me, perhaps I have just got it wrong!

Written Brunei English

Brunei Malay is almost never written (though that now may be changing with the widespread use of Brunei Malay in social media — perhaps it now might be emerging as a written language?).

However, sometimes words of Brunei Malay do appear in the newspaper. On page M2 of the Media Permata of 20 May, 2017, in an article about the traditions of Kampong Ayer, I found the following six words that are not listed in my Malay Dictionary, and I had to refer to a Brunei Malay dictionary to find out what they mean:

• sira ('salt')
• indung ('mother')
• berselawat ('read a prayer')
• gubang ('kind of boat')
• celapa ('box for betel nut or tobacco')
• memburis ('build (a boat)')

The first three are actually included in the online Pusat Rujukan Persuratan Melayu (PRPM) site (here), so perhaps they are known in standard Malay.

However, in PRPM sira is glossed as gula ('sugar') rather than garam ('salt'), so maybe it is a different word. Furthermore, I am not sure if there is a difference between sira and garam in Brunei Malay — maybe sira is some special kind of salt used for ceremonial purposes?

The third word is actually shown as bersalawat in my Brunei Malay dictionary and it is glossed as berselawat, so perhaps the absence of berselawat from my Standard Malay dictionary is an oversight of that dictionary.

Actually, celapa is listed as calapa in the Brunei Malay dictionary, and I can't find celapa anywhere. Perhaps [ə] is becoming acceptable in the initial unstressed syllables of Brunei Malay words.

While the status of some of these words as idiosyncratic of Brunei Malay might be questioned, some of them certainly do reflect local usage; and while inclusion of a few words of Brunei Malay in an article on local traditions is not really written Brunei Malay, and certainly there is no hint of adopting Brunei Malay syntax in the article, the use of these words represents an encouraging attempt to preserve traditional language.

Siak

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 my presentation on the Friday, my hosts very kindly arranged a visit to the scenic town of Siak, about a two hour drive away.

About 20 of us set off in a bus and it was about 12:30 by the time we got there, so of course the men had to go to the mosque. That was fine, and I just sat outside and read a book while eating the packed lunch they had provided. After the end of the service, and after the Imam and all his assistants had come to meet me and have their pictures taken with me, we set off for the Istana (palace). But it turned out that the Mayor wanted to meet us. So first we had to trek off to the Mayor's Office.

Now, I imagined we would just go in, he would shake my hand, say 'welcome to Siak', and then we would be off. But nothing is ever that simple in Indonesia. We were shown into a lecture theatre, and I was informed that I would be expected to give a speech!

Eventually the Mayor turned up, and after the prayers and readings from the Quran, the Dean of Arts gave a speech, I gave a speech, and then the Mayor gave a speech which lasted 20 minutes or more. I didn't understand it all, but I think it was about their efforts to boost tourism to Siak.

Finally, we did set off for the Istana, which turned out to be quite pretty and interesting.

Apparently, it was built in 1889, but the last Sultan (who died in 1949) donated it to the newly emerging Republic of Indonesia in 1945, and it has been a museum since then.

The trip was memorable, and I am grateful for the generosity of my hosts from the university. I enjoyed the Istana, but I haven't quite worked out what the visit to the Mayor's Office achieved. I guess they do things differently in Indonesia.

ISELLA Conference

On the second day of my visit to Pekanbaru, I was a keynote speaker at the ISELLA 2017 conference (International Seminar on Education, Language, Literature and Art) organised by Universitas Islam Riau. Some of the ways this conference proceeded were quite surprising to me, though I guess people who have attended lots of conferences in Indonesia would not find them unusual.

Inevitably, the conference began with plenty of ceremony: a prayer, a reading from the Quran, a dance, welcoming speeches by the Director and various Deans and so forth. In this photo, the dancer on the left is holding a casket from which she offered something to eat to each of the speakers:

And here is the Director of the university giving his welcome speech:

What really surprised me was that, while the various people were giving their speeches, virtually nobody was even pretending to pay attention:

People were chatting, or reading messages on their mobile phones, maybe even playing games on their phones, and a few were sleeping, but none of it seemed to matter.

So, was anyone listening to me when I gave my presentation? I doubt it.

Maybe that is how people do things in Indonesia. The speaker is like a television screen in the corner of your living room, and family life goes on with people sometimes looking at the screen but mostly chatting, eating, or whatever. Perhaps that is quite healthy: people in Indonesia are very sociable, and they enjoy chatting and eating with friends, so in a conference the speech or presentation taking place at the front is largely irrelevant.

It is bit like traditional street opera I have seen in Taiwan: you go there, chat to your friends, eat melon seeds and chicken feet, sometimes watch a bit of the show, and come and go as you please; but the idea of people keeping quiet and listening in rapt attention to the opera is quite alien.

I found it rather disconcerting to give a presentation that nobody was listening to; but none of the other presenters seemed too worried.

Kotabaru

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 conference organised by Universitas Islam Riau.

I don't usually take selfies — I don't understand why people go to a beautiful place and then take a photo of themselves. Why not just take a picture of the beautiful place? But anyway, here is a (sort of) selfie of me.

Actually, in Indonesia, people seem obsessed with taking photos of themselves. At the end of my lecture, every single student from the audience wanted to have a photo taken with me. Fortunately, they did it in groups of 10 or 15, but even so there were quite a few photos!

Goodness knows what happens to all those photos. Anyway, I was a guest there, so if they all want to take photos with me, that's fine.

Car Registrations

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 ...

However, they skip a few in the sequence, for various reasons. For example, BAI was skipped. I always assumed that this was because it sounds like 'pig' in Brunei Malay, and nobody would want to buy a car that had 'pig' as its registration; but my colleague tells me it is because the 'I' could be confused with 1. I'll need to check that -- on that basis, presumably BAO was also skipped, because the O could be confused with 0. I'll keep an eye out to see if there are any BAO registrations

Anyway, I always assumed that they would skip BAU, as it means 'smelly' in Malay. But it seems I was wrong:

Ugama Schools

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, together with my PhD student, Ishamina Athirah. (For the full paper, see here.)

In addition to analysing numbers of students taking English- and Malay-medium degrees at UBD, we presented data on code-switching by Bruneian speakers, particularly instances of code-switching that resulted in misunderstandings occurring. For example, consider the following example, in which a female from the Maldives (FMd) is talking to a female from Brunei (FBr):

FMd: what are what are the subjects ah they study

FBr: in ugama school?

FMd: ah yeah yeah

FBr: erm ah they

FMd: you mean government?

FBr: gov- in the government will be like erm how do you say ah? e:rm (.) i'm not really familiar but what i know is like they're teaching you (.) civics

FBr uses the term 'ugama school' (= religious school), but FMd does not understand it, and she hears 'government school' instead. In fact, FBr then continues to talk about government schools, apparently unaware that a misunderstanding has occurred.

On the whole, Brunei speakers are adept at avoiding switching into Malay when their interlocutor is from elsewhere; but there are a few examples such as this in the data where code-switching causes a misunderstanding.

Medium of Instructon

In the paper I discussed in my previous post, we investigated the medium of instruction at UBD, which is supposed to be a bilingual university. Using the graduation figures for 2006 and 2014, we analysed how things have changed. And these are the results for the medium of instruction of the major of graduating students in those two years:

These figures show that, while 33.5% of students graduated in a Malay-medium major in 2006, only 17.6% of those in 2014 did, which suggests that English as a medium of instruction is becoming increasingly dominant at UBD.

Although the figures for Malay-medium degrees such as Bahasa Melayu dan Linguistik and Kesusasteraan Melayu offered by FASS have increased from 25 to 70, this increase is more than overshadowed by the loss of students of education in SHBIE taking Malay-medium degrees. Indeed, the number of those taking English-medium degrees in Arts (FASS), Science (FOS) and Business (SBE) show a massive increase.

For the full paper, see here: download paper.

Malay Names

Malay names in publications always cause a problem. Publishers insist on knowing what the surname is; and Malays do not have surnames. This is a constant battle, and there seems to be no way of winning it.

A chapter I wrote with my PhD student, Ishamina Athirah, has just been published in an edited book entitled English Medium Instruction in Higher Education in Asia-Pacific (published by Springer). Have a look at the entry in the table of contents:

Her name is Ishamina Athirah; it is NOT Athirah Ishamina. But what to do? I have suggested that, in future, she always uses her married name (Gardiner) — then there will never be a problem. In fact, we've already modified her webpage (see here).

In addition, we have prepared a PDF version that can easily downloaded (here), showing the correct name. I hope this paper will be of interest to scholars in Brunei.

Candies

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 as 'furnitures', 'equipments' and 'accommodations' in having a plural form in this part of the world?

I just checked the Corpus of Contemporary American English (here), and there are 897 tokens of 'candies' in the 500 million words of the corpus; so I guess it does sometimes occur in American English. On the other hand, 'candy' occurs 10,500 times, so the non-count version of the noun is clearly more common.

Perhaps the distinction between count and non-count nouns is slowly being eroded, led by usage in places such as Brunei and Singapore. Perhaps 'candies' will become the international norm, and so will 'furnitures' and 'equipments'.

One other observation about this shop sign: it reflects the growing Americanisation of Brunei English, as the use of 'candy' (or 'candies') is much more common in America than Britain.

No Bookshops

This is the departure concourse at Brunei International Airport:

While you can buy things such as food, clothes, jewellery, watches, chocolate, cosmetics, perfume and souvenirs, there appears to be nowhere to buy anything to read. Not even a magazine, as far as I can see.

Is this the only international airport in the world where you cannot buy a book, a magazine, or even a newspaper?

I guess people are too busy looking at their i-phones to read.

Verb Usage to Express Future Time

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.

When I arrived at work at 7:05 am this morning, there was no assignment in my pigeonhole. It eventually arrived at about 8:00 am (I guess).

So, here's my question: was my student lying, in the expectation that I wouldn't arrive so early so would not find out? Or is her grammatical usage flawed, and she does not distinguish between 'put' and 'will put' to express future time?

Note: we cannot refer to tense, as 'put' is an irregular verb, and it could either be present or past tense. However, it would be normal to include the modal auxiliary 'will' to refer to a future event. So I don't know if she was actually telling the truth, telling me that she intended to submit the assignment soon, or if she was lying in the hope that I would not find out about the mismatch between the stated time of submission and the actual time.

batteries is free

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 money on making a big sign like that and not bother to get the grammar right. How difficult is it to use of plural verb with a plural subject?

Impact Factor

Academic journals are ranked according to an 'Impact Factor'. This is defined as the average number of citations each paper in the journal receives within two years of its publication (see here).

Now, this might work well in biology, where the turn-around for papers is fast; but it is completely ludicrous for areas such as linguistics, as it is quite common for a delay of two years or more between the submission of a paper and its publication. If it takes two years to get a paper published, there is no way that there can be ANY citations in the two years after it is published.

This is totally absurd; but it seems that the sciences are running the show, and the fact that the way this Impact Factor is measured is ridiculous for the arts does not seem make any difference. Linguistics journals are ranked by their Impact Factor, just like scientific journals.

One of the journals I have published most with, the Journal of the International Phonetic Association (see here), gives their Impact Factor as 0.43. That means that less than half of the papers in the journal generate any citations within the first two years. Quite frankly, I am amazed that it is so high.

One of strategies journals seem to have adopted to try and boost their Impact Factor is use of 'First Read'. About two years ago, together with my PhD student Ishamina Athirah, I submitted a paper on the pronunciation of Brunei Malay, and it has finally been published in the first issue of 2017. But it was actually ready for publication in June last year and it was then made available in a First Read site.

So why the delay? My guess is that the journal put it in First Read for several months with the aim of generating some interest; so it is hoped that, now that it is fully published, there may be some citations within the two-year window.

This is very frustrating, as it was hard to make use of the material when it did not have a proper volume number or page number. Anyway, it is now published, so that is nice. You can find out some more about it from my dedicated website (see here):

I hope that the paper can offer a useful resource on the pronunciation of Brunei Malay. Maybe I'll even get a citation or two within two years!

Circle Line

In my previous post about recorded messages in the Singapore MRT trains, I discussed pronunciation of 'next station' that deviates from the way that people in Britain or America might say the phrase.

Another utterance in which the pronunciation deviates from what would be expected in Britain or America involves the phrasal noun 'Circle Line' (and indeed other lines, such as 'North-East Line'). Consider this recorded utterance I heard on the MRT trains:

Change at this station for the Circle \LINE

The sentence stress is placed on 'line', becasue it is the last word in the utterance. But 'Circle Line' is a phrasal noun, and the standard pronunciation of phrasal nouns involves putting the main stress on the first element: TRAFfic lights, PARKing ticket, POST office, CARbon paper, FOOTball field, TENnis court, SWIMming pool, CIRCle line, etc.

Does this failure to use phrasal noun stress in Singapore matter? Probably not, for it is hard to imagine anyone misunderstanding 'circle LINE'. In fact, the use of falling intonation with the main stress occurring on the final item of an utterance seems to be adopted to clearly indicate the end of the utterance, so it actually has an important role in the intonation of Singapore English.

I suspect that I may be the only person in Singapore who actually notices the difference between 'CIRCle line' and 'Circle LINE'; so I see no need for the MRT authorities to go and change their recordings. In fact, the way the utterances are said probably resonates well with local people

Next Station

In the Singapore MRT trains, the announcements are all pre-recorded using exceptionally precise pronunciation; and the phrase 'next station' is spoken very carefully, with all the medial consonants /kstst/ articulated. Five consecutive consonants!

This is quite an extraordinary achievement. No speaker from Britain or America would ever do that, and it would be much more normal to drop the medial /t/. Then the sequence would become /kst/, which is far easier.

Although the way it is said in the MRT trains sounds rather unnatural, retention of the medial /t/ probably enhances intelligibility, so it should be encouraged.

In fact, one could argue that just because speakers from places such as Britain would most probably drop the medial /t/, there is no reason for people in Singapore to follow suit if they can enhance intelligibility by articulating the /t/. So the way it is said on the MRT trains is really rather admirable.

Spelling out names

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

Today, there was a case when I was trying to spell out my surname, and I started D E T ..., but the woman wrote T E D. What caused this?

The problem probably arose because of variable voicing and aspiration on plosives. My /d/ is voiceless but unaspirated, while my /t/ is voiceless and fully aspirated. But many people in this part of the world have fully voiced /d/ and unaspirated /t/, which means that for them my /d/ may sound like a /t/; and they may not pick up the aspiration on my /t/.

What is of further interest is how to resolve this misunderstanding. My usual strategy is to use the international radiotelephonic alphabet: Delta Echo Tango ... But some people are not familiar with this code. In this instance when I tried to resolve the issue, the woman starting writing Delta ... So that didn't work.

I have always thought it would be really valuable if everyone learned the international code, to facilitate spelling out names and other words. But that doesn't seem to be happening.

On the other hand, I believe the local custom is to use country names: Denmark England Thailand etc. And maybe I should remember to do that.

Exit C

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

The only instance so far in which I have misunderstood something is when I asked a man in an MRT station how to get to the DBS Bank, and he replied 'Exit C'. But he said it as [esiʔsi], and I heard it as SCC. (Maybe Singapore Cricket Club?)

Three things may have contributed to this token of misunderstanding:

• the missing /k/ in 'exit'
• the glottal stop [ʔ] in place of /t/ at the end of 'exit'
• a lack of distinction between the short vowel in the second syllable of 'exit' and the vowel in 'C'

My feeling is that the missing /k/ was the key factor. A glottal stop at the end of 'exit' is not unexpected (and is probably the way that I would have said the word); and, in the absence of a recording, I can't be sure about the quality of the vowels in 'exit' and 'C'. But the use of [s] for the consonants in the middle of 'exit' were problematic.

majoriti

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 of the Media Permata of 18 February, 2017:

Puak Khasi, yang bilangannya tidak sampai sejuta, adalah komuniti majoriti daripada 2.5 juta pwnduduk di Maghalanya.

which might be translated as:

The Khasi people, who number less than one million, are the majority of the 2.5 million residents in Maghala.

Er ... one million is not a majority of 2.5 million. The Khasi people might be the largest group in Maghala, but they are not a majority. Or perhaps majoriti has a shifted meaning.

No Overtaking

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 placed.

In fact, they are at the top of the short access road to the satellite station behind the Radisson Hotel in BSB. While it is popular with walkers, some of whom do their morning exercise by walking up and down this hill a few times, and others use the road to head into the Tasek forest, there are almost never any cars on it. My estimate is that maybe two or three cars a day use this road.

Sure, it's a steep hill (which is why people looking for a bit of exercise like to use it). But as there are almost no cars on it, there is no opportunity to overtake. Ever.

So why is there a no overtaking sign there? My guess is that there is a regulation somewhere that all steep hills must have these signs, and someone has followed this regulation even though it makes no sense in this case. But who knows?

Pronunciation of Tutong

I have been working on the pronunciation of the indigenous languages of Brunei, hoping to make recordings available for people to listen to. Here is my effort for Tutong, a recording of the following passage:

Masa Barui Utara samo Mato Aluh bagagut pasal inayih yo paleng kuat, ado dai urang parantau sabi. Ido setujui inayih yo mala’ gama’ nih nanggalkan jubah parantau ina’, iyo dai paleng kuat. Barui Utara mbepar sakuat-kuat nih. Tapi makin kuat nih mbepar makin kuat dai atin parantau ina ngimbit jubah nih. Barui Utara pun ngalah dirih. Tiru ina’ Mato Aluh mamancar sakuat kuat nih. Sabi parantau ina’ ndo tan terus banuka nih jubah nih. Jadi Barui Utara tapaksa dai ngakun alah yo Mato Aluh ina lebih kuat kod iyo.

Making this recording posed some interesting problems. The main one was that Tutong is not a written language, so getting a Tutong speaker to read a passage fluently was not easy. But it seems to have worked out OK.

Another issue is variation in Tutong. This speaker uses [ə] in words such as lebih ('more') where others might use [a]; and he also says paleng ('most') when others would say palyeng; but variation is always an issue, and this is modern Tutong as spoken by the younger generation.

Rhoticity in Brunei English

Rhoticity involves producing the [r] sound whenever 'r' occurs in the spelling, including at the end of words such as 'car' and before a consonant in words such as 'park'. RP British English is non-rhotic, as there is no [r] sound in these words.

Early accounts of the pronunciation of Brunei English written in the 1990s make no reference to rhoticity, but it is not clear if Brunei English was non-rhotic at the time or if the occurrence of [r] was not regarded as important enough to merit discussion. And it is hard to get hold of recordings to check on the extent of rhoticity at that time.

More recent accounts suggest that about half of university undergraduates have a rhotic accent, and furthermore, it is believed that the incidence of rhoticity is increasing. But how can we check this?

My PhD student, Nur Raihan Mohamad, has recorded three groups of speakers: secondary school students, university undergraduates, and in-service teachers. If we find that the younger speakers are more rhotic than the older ones, this provides evidence that rhoticity is increasing. But there is a problem with this: the school students are less well-educated than the undergraduates, and it is possible that this has an impact on rhoticity.

However, there is an alternative approach. We now have recordings of university undergraduates made between 2007 and 2010 and some more recent recordings made in 2016, so we can compare these two sets of recordings and thereby find out if rhoticity is increasing.

One issue is that knowledge of whether the recording is older or more recent might impact on judgements. So I randomised the order of 21 early recordings and 21 more recent recordings, and then Nur Raihan listened to them and judged whether each speaker was rhotic or not. (She also tried to guess whether the recording was an early one or a later one, and she was basically unable to guess that correctly.)

The results of her listening are shown in this table:

These results clearly show that rhoticity in the more recent recordings is much higher than in the earlier ones: while about half of the earlier speakers had a rhotic accent (as expected), all but two out of twenty-one of the speakers in the more recent recordings were rhotic. This is really surprising: it is rare to find such a shift in patterns of pronunciation over just seven years.

To confirm the results, we asked another research student, Sufi Redzwan, to repeat the listening. And he got exactly the same results: about half of the early recordings were rhotic, while all but two of the more recent ones were. So it is confirmed that rhoticity has increased substantially over the past few years.

This work is written up as Nur Raihan (2017) – see here.

Playing extracts

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 to be more problematic. But let's see if the following code enables you to listen to this recording of the 'North Wind and the Sun' passage in Brunei Malay:

It seems to work! In future, maybe I'll be able to make more speech extracts available.

Diphthongs in Brunei Malay

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 diphthongs? How many diphthongs does Brunei Malay have?

Some people would say three, [ai], [au], [oi]. Illustrative words are:

• garai ('food stall')
• palau ('dazed')
• baloi ('worthwhile')

However, note that these three diphthongs can only occur at the end of a word. In cases in which they occur in the middle of a word (e.g. kain 'cloth', daun 'leaf'), these words actually have two syllables, so we can say there is a sequence of two monophthong vowels.

If a diphthong can only occur at the end of a word, with no following consonant, then we might say that it is a monophthong followed by an approximant. If words such as yang ('which') and wang ('money') can start with an approximant, we can also say that garai and palau end with an approximant.

On this basis, we analyse the three words above as: /garaj/, /palaw/ and /baluj/. So there are no diphthongs in Brunei Malay.

For further discussion of diphthongs in Brunei Malay and the chance to listen to these words, see here.

Brunei Malay Vowels

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 Brunei Malay dictionary (published by the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka Brunei) shows prefixes with 'e' (indicating pronunciation as [ə]). As a result, while beli (to buy) is shown as bali in Brunei Malay, its prefixed form is shown as membali.

Is this right? If Brunei Malay only has three vowels, how can prefixes have [ə]? Shouldn't the prefixed form be mambali?

The problem is that the vowel in the prefix is often not as open as [a], especially among young speakers (perhaps influenced by Standard Malay, which has six vowels, including /ə/).

Here is a plot of the three vowels, measured from the reading of a short text by a young female speaker:

Note the substantial overlap between /a/ and /u/, much of which is caused by this prefix. If we plot the prefix separately, here shown as 'e', then the overlap is reduced:

However, in some cases the prefix is produced with a more open vowel, so there seems to be substantial variation.

For more information on the pronunciation of Brunei Malay and the chance to listen to the recordings on which the analysis was based, see here.