Although the lingua franca in the country is generally the local dialect of Malay,[1] all educated people are proficient in English, as it has been the medium of instruction from the fourth year of primary school since 1985.
[2] There are various features that make Brunei English distinct: for pronunciation, the sound at the start of a word such as three is often [t] rather than [θ], and there is usually a full vowel rather than [ə] in function words such as as, than, and of; for grammar, furnitures and jewelleries are treated as plural nouns, and there is variable use of the third-person −s suffix on present-tense verbs; and for lexis, many words are borrowed from Malay to reflect local customs, including titah (a speech by the Sultan) and tudung (a head scarf).
Research undertaken in 2011 showed that undergraduates at the University of Brunei Darussalam (UBD) could identify whether a fellow undergraduate was Malay or Chinese on the basis of 10 seconds of spoken English with an accuracy of about 74%, which suggests that the English pronunciation of the two ethnic groups differs to some extent.
[31] Many initialisms are found, including:[32] Acronyms (where the letters create a word) are not so common, but we find:[33] There are some idiosyncratic expressions in Brunei English, such as dry season to refer to the period just before payday when people are short of money, as in 'I cannot pay now: dry season bah!
An investigation of the language used in an English-medium discussion forum showed that nearly half of all postings were partly or completely in Malay.
[35] In data involving a map task, where one participant has to guide a second participant along a route, a speaker said:[36] uh so jalan saja uh continue macam ada a bit corneringwith four words of Malay in the English utterance: jalan (walk), saja (just), macam (like) and ada (there is).