I was recently told that young people in Brunei write messages like this when texting:
im finna go to store
The more formal version of this would be:
I'm going to go to the store.
So, where does 'finna' come from? Apparently, it is from 'fixing to', which is a common way of expressing future time in the South of the USA (see here). But African-American speakers then pronounce 'fixing to' as 'finna'.
How did African American informal usage get into informal Brunei English? It seems to be the kind of Internet slang that is becoming used globally on platforms such as Twitter. I wonder how much else in modern text-speak is derived from African American English.
