World Englishes Special issue English
World Englishes, Vol. , No. , pp. 492–496, 2016.
0883-2919
Introduction: English in Brunei Darussalam
JAMES MCLELLAN∗ AND GRACE V. S. CHIN∗∗
ABSTRACT: This special issue of World Englishes presents new research perspectives on English
in Brunei Darussalam, a small oil-rich Islamic monarchy in Southeast Asia. It comprises a number of
articles on language in society and on literature, as well as a comprehensive bibliography a comprehensive
bibliography listing published studies on English in Brunei Darussalam. Most of the contributors are based
in the country, including a number who are Bruneian citizens, and are thus able to offer insiders’ perspectives
on the subject.
Brunei is located in northwestern Borneo, on the South China Sea with land borders on
three sides with the Malaysian state of Sarawak. It is a plural society with a population
of 422, 675 (Index Mundi 2015), with Malays as the majority (about 66%), followed by
Chinese (11%), indigenous groups (3%) and others (mostly expatriate workers 20%). This
varied composition is reflected in the linguistic diversity that belies its very small land size
of 5,765 km², with over 20 indigenous and immigrant languages being spoken, including Brunei Malay, ‘Standard Malay’, English, Kedayan, Tutong, Belait, Dusun, Bisaya,
Murut (Lun Bawang), Iban, Penan, Mandarin, Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese, Hainanese,
Teochew and Foochow. Despite its ethnolinguistic plurality, the state officially recognises
only Malay (Bahasa Melayu) as the national language. The national religion is Islam, with
approximately 80 per cent of the population identifying as Muslim. The country is governed
as an absolute monarchy. The current head of state, the 29th Sultan of Brunei, is directly
descended from a line of rulers dating back to the fourteenth century. As head of state, the
Sultan is also the head of Islamic affairs in the nation, as affirmed by the 1959 Constitution.
The official national ideology is Melayu Islam Beraja (MIB), or Malay Islamic
Monarchy, wherein the values and ideology of the state are based on a foundation of Malay
culture and language, Sunni-Shafie’e Islam, and an understanding of the monarch as head
of state, answerable to God in the carrying out of his duties. Formalised through state
policies and institutions, particularly in the education sector, MIB is intended to foster
bonds of loyalty and attachment to the nation and the Sultan, and to promote national
integration, identity and culture. The privileging of Malay Muslim identity has resulted in
a monocultural vision of nationhood, seen in the active homogenising ‘processes of both
Islam-ization and Malay-icization’ (Noor Azam 2012: 176) which has come to dominate
the sociopolitical landscape. Language, which defines one’s identity and place, has thus
become a subject of anxiety among some of the more conservative sections of Brunei
∗ Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Jalan Tungku Link, BE1410 Gadong, Brunei Darussalam. E-mail: james.mclellan@
ubd.edu.bn
∗∗ Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Jalan Tungku Link, BE1410 Gadong, Brunei Darussalam. E-mail: gvschin@
gmail.com
C 2016
John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Introduction: English in Brunei Darussalam
493
Figure 1. Brunei and Southeast Asia
Source: Courtesy of David Deterding.
Figure 2. Map of Brunei
Source: Courtesy of David Deterding.
society, especially at a time of resurgence and reinforcement of Malay Islamic values
in the Sultanate. Although Malay is upheld as the premier language and lingua franca,
English has long been a contender in terms of popular usage.
As a former British protectorate from 1888 until regaining full independence in 1984,
Brunei is no stranger to the English language. English is used in the education system,
C 2016
John Wiley & Sons Ltd
494
James McLellan and Grace V. S. Chin
with recent reforms establishing English as a medium of instruction for subjects such as
science and mathematics from as early as Primary Year One (Ministry of Education 2009;
Jones 2012). Even before these recent innovations, English was used from 1985 onwards
as a medium of instruction for these and other subjects starting from Primary Year Four,
and as a result, the majority of the population of Brunei have received a bilingual education
and are, in varying degrees, bilingual speakers of Malay and English. Most degree,
certificate and diploma programmes at Brunei tertiary institutions are delivered through
the medium of English, except for those offered at the Islamic university, Universiti Islam
Sultan Sharif Ali (UNISSA), and the Islamic religious teachers’ training college, Kolej
Universiti Perguruan Ugama Seri Begawan (KUPU-SB).
Nevertheless, English is not an official language of Brunei, a status that is reserved
for Malay (Bahasa Melayu). The position of English in Brunei is thus problematic if we
reserve the status of Outer Circle countries for those where English has an official role.
In practice, however, the use of English in education and in legal domains, the widespread
knowledge of English and the use of English as a lingua franca to communicate with the
large expatriate worker community, and inter-ethnically between Malay and non-Malay
Bruneians, all support English in Brunei as ESL rather than EFL. As a direct consequence
of the high level of Malay-English bilingualism, code-switching has become a common
linguistic phenomenon, both in informal interactions and in social media domains. For
many Bruneians, Brunei Malay-English code-switching is an unconscious and unmarked
feature of their language, as in many bi- and multilingual communities elsewhere (Li
2007; Ng & Wigglesworth 2007).
The articles in this special issue present current research into developments within
and around Brunei English. They also reflect the fact that despite the conservative forces
of MIB, Brunei, like its Southeast Asian neighbours, is experiencing a time of flux and
change brought about by the forces of modernisation and globalisation. Cable television
and the Internet can be found in most Bruneian homes, while tech-savvy youths navigate
the cyber-world of social networking, blogging and YouTube with ease. To provide a
comprehensive understanding of Brunei English and its different dimensions, the articles
have been grouped under four sections: (1) the sociolinguistic background; (2) the
linguistic features of Brunei English; (3) discourse features; and (4) creative writing.
Finally there is a bibliography, compiled by the co-editors, which offers a comprehensive
listing of previous studies on English in Brunei.
Under ‘Sociolinguistic background,’ the articles by Paolo Coluzzi and by Gary Jones,
offer both an update and new information on Brunei English. Coluzzi’s article breaks
new ground by using a linguistic landscapes approach and methodology for analysing
language choice and use in signs found in one of the main streets in Bandar Seri Begawan,
the capital city. Jones provides an update on the role of English in the Brunei education
system. He compares government and private schools and reports on the attitudes of
teachers, parents and other stakeholders.
The second section, ‘Linguistic features of Brunei English,’ comprises four articles on
phonology and grammar. The first article by Nur Raihan Mohamad and David Deterding
offers an overview of research findings on the pronunciation of Brunei English, mostly
focusing on segmental features, including rhoticity. This is followed by Debbie Ho and
David Deterding’s article which reviews research into Brunei English grammatical features.
Both these articles attempt to identify features that are unique to the English of Brunei,
as well as those which are also found in neighbouring Southeast Asian Englishes. The
C 2016
John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Introduction: English in Brunei Darussalam
495
other article in this section is Ulrik Gut’s article is on suprasegmental features, specifically
the intonation patterns found in questions asked by Bruneians in conversations with other
Bruneians. Her findings are of wider interest since she investigates whether the prosodic
features reflect the influence of Brunei Malay through L1 transfer, whether they are closer
to British English as the purported target model for Bruneian learners of English, or whether
they resemble the patterns found in neighbouring Englishes such as Malaysian English.
The two articles in the section ‘Discourse features’ both contain analysis of textual data
from the social media domain, in which English and Brunei Malay coexist. According
to Clynes (2014), Brunei Malay (cakap barunay, kurapak barunay) is a vibrant, rapidly
expanding variety which expresses the dominant Brunei Malay ethnic identity in the
country. This variety of Malay language is referred to in Alex Henry and Debbie Ho’s
article, which investigates code-switching in interactions between local buyers and sellers
on Facebook, and in the article by Nurdiyana Daud and James McLellan, whose data come
from Facebook status updates. These two articles complement each other without overlapping: both use data from Bruneians’ Facebook pages, and both investigate patterns of
language choice and code-switching, but they differ in terms of the analytical frameworks
used. Henry and Ho’s analysis draws on a combination of genre-based move structure and
systemic textual analysis (under the umbrella of systemic functional linguistics) which
is applied to a corpus of sales transactions conducted through Facebook. In the article
by Nurdiyana and McLellan, Bruneians’ Facebook status updates are analysed in terms
of relational maintenance strategies and cross-gender variation in code choice, emotive
language and emoticons, and the use of abbreviated spellings in Malay and English.
The study of Brunei English would be incomplete without an analysis of its aesthetic
and literary dimensions. Bruneian literature in English is still at a nascent stage (Chin
2007; Kathrina, Chin & Jukim 2016), but there are ongoing developments that contribute
significantly to our understanding of the language situation. After all, as social and cultural
texts, literature is revealing of the negotiations and transformations in the linguistic
landscape that include resistance against the hegemonic narratives of the nation. This is
seen in the last two articles in the final section, ‘Creative writing and literature,’ which
offer new research on the intersections between language and literature. Grace V. S. Chin’s
analysis of Bruneian women’s creative writing in English as an emergent minor literature
connects gender and language, showing how women’s writings in English potentially
resist the state imperatives of MIB in works of fiction that employ bilingualism, or
multilingualism, to convey ‘an alternative vision of heterogeneous diversity’. Kathrina
Mohd Daud, on the other hand, examines the growing genre of Bruneian horror stories in
Cyberspace and how their use of colloquial language undermines the rigid boundaries of
MIB with their ‘disengagement of the religious from both the cultural and the political’.
For all the authorities’ attempts to preserve Malay identity and culture through
exclusionary tropes, the articles here reveal ongoing linguistic negotiations and practices
in the social spaces that go beyond MIB prescriptions, demonstrating that Brunei is a
dynamic and vibrant ‘glocal’ space that is ever-evolving. We thus invite readers to make
further connections between the local Brunei context and the wider global context.
Finally we would like to express our sincerest thanks to the Editors of World Englishes
and to the anonymous reviewers for their unstinting support and constructive suggestions
throughout the process of preparing this special issue. We also gratefully acknowledge
the important contributions made by Charlotte Choo and Christian Teo of Nanyang
Technological University (NTU), Singapore.
C 2016
John Wiley & Sons Ltd
496
James McLellan and Grace V. S. Chin
REFERENCES
Chin, Grace V. S. 2007. Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam: A comparative study of literary developments in
English. Asian Englishes 10(2). 8–29.
Clynes, Adrian. 2014. Brunei Malay: An overview. In Adrian Clynes, Michael Boutin & Peter Sercombe (eds.), Advances
in linguistic and cultural research in Borneo: Studies in memory of Peter W. Martin, 153–200. Phillips, ME: Borneo
Research Council.
Index Mundi. 2015. Brunei population. http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/brunei/population/. (28 January, 2016.)
Jones, Gary. 2012. Language planning in its historical context in Brunei Darussalam. In Ee Ling Low & Azirah Hashim
(eds.), English in Southeast Asia: Features, policy and language in use, 175–187. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kathrina, Daud Mohd, Grace V. S. Chin & Maslin Jukim. 2016. Contemporary English and Malay literature in Brunei: A
comparison. In Noor Azam Haji-Othman, James McLellan & David Deterding (eds.), The use and status of language
in Brunei Darussalam: A kingdom of unexpected linguistic treasures, 241–251. Dordrecht: Springer.
Li, Wei. 2007. The bilingualism reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
Ministry of Education Brunei Darussalam. 2009. Sistem pendidikan negara abad ke-21. Bandar Seri Begawan: Ministry
of Education.
Ng, Bee Chin & Gillian Wigglesworth. 2007. Bilingualism: An advanced resource book. London: Routledge.
Noor Azam Haji-Othman. 2012. It’s not always English: ‘Duelling aunties’ in Brunei Darussalam. In Vaughan Rapatahana
& Pauline Bunce (eds.), English language as hydra: Its impacts on non-English language cultures, 175–190. Bristol:
Multilingual Matters.
(Received 2 September 2016)
C 2016
John Wiley & Sons Ltd
0883-2919
Introduction: English in Brunei Darussalam
JAMES MCLELLAN∗ AND GRACE V. S. CHIN∗∗
ABSTRACT: This special issue of World Englishes presents new research perspectives on English
in Brunei Darussalam, a small oil-rich Islamic monarchy in Southeast Asia. It comprises a number of
articles on language in society and on literature, as well as a comprehensive bibliography a comprehensive
bibliography listing published studies on English in Brunei Darussalam. Most of the contributors are based
in the country, including a number who are Bruneian citizens, and are thus able to offer insiders’ perspectives
on the subject.
Brunei is located in northwestern Borneo, on the South China Sea with land borders on
three sides with the Malaysian state of Sarawak. It is a plural society with a population
of 422, 675 (Index Mundi 2015), with Malays as the majority (about 66%), followed by
Chinese (11%), indigenous groups (3%) and others (mostly expatriate workers 20%). This
varied composition is reflected in the linguistic diversity that belies its very small land size
of 5,765 km², with over 20 indigenous and immigrant languages being spoken, including Brunei Malay, ‘Standard Malay’, English, Kedayan, Tutong, Belait, Dusun, Bisaya,
Murut (Lun Bawang), Iban, Penan, Mandarin, Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese, Hainanese,
Teochew and Foochow. Despite its ethnolinguistic plurality, the state officially recognises
only Malay (Bahasa Melayu) as the national language. The national religion is Islam, with
approximately 80 per cent of the population identifying as Muslim. The country is governed
as an absolute monarchy. The current head of state, the 29th Sultan of Brunei, is directly
descended from a line of rulers dating back to the fourteenth century. As head of state, the
Sultan is also the head of Islamic affairs in the nation, as affirmed by the 1959 Constitution.
The official national ideology is Melayu Islam Beraja (MIB), or Malay Islamic
Monarchy, wherein the values and ideology of the state are based on a foundation of Malay
culture and language, Sunni-Shafie’e Islam, and an understanding of the monarch as head
of state, answerable to God in the carrying out of his duties. Formalised through state
policies and institutions, particularly in the education sector, MIB is intended to foster
bonds of loyalty and attachment to the nation and the Sultan, and to promote national
integration, identity and culture. The privileging of Malay Muslim identity has resulted in
a monocultural vision of nationhood, seen in the active homogenising ‘processes of both
Islam-ization and Malay-icization’ (Noor Azam 2012: 176) which has come to dominate
the sociopolitical landscape. Language, which defines one’s identity and place, has thus
become a subject of anxiety among some of the more conservative sections of Brunei
∗ Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Jalan Tungku Link, BE1410 Gadong, Brunei Darussalam. E-mail: james.mclellan@
ubd.edu.bn
∗∗ Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Jalan Tungku Link, BE1410 Gadong, Brunei Darussalam. E-mail: gvschin@
gmail.com
C 2016
John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Introduction: English in Brunei Darussalam
493
Figure 1. Brunei and Southeast Asia
Source: Courtesy of David Deterding.
Figure 2. Map of Brunei
Source: Courtesy of David Deterding.
society, especially at a time of resurgence and reinforcement of Malay Islamic values
in the Sultanate. Although Malay is upheld as the premier language and lingua franca,
English has long been a contender in terms of popular usage.
As a former British protectorate from 1888 until regaining full independence in 1984,
Brunei is no stranger to the English language. English is used in the education system,
C 2016
John Wiley & Sons Ltd
494
James McLellan and Grace V. S. Chin
with recent reforms establishing English as a medium of instruction for subjects such as
science and mathematics from as early as Primary Year One (Ministry of Education 2009;
Jones 2012). Even before these recent innovations, English was used from 1985 onwards
as a medium of instruction for these and other subjects starting from Primary Year Four,
and as a result, the majority of the population of Brunei have received a bilingual education
and are, in varying degrees, bilingual speakers of Malay and English. Most degree,
certificate and diploma programmes at Brunei tertiary institutions are delivered through
the medium of English, except for those offered at the Islamic university, Universiti Islam
Sultan Sharif Ali (UNISSA), and the Islamic religious teachers’ training college, Kolej
Universiti Perguruan Ugama Seri Begawan (KUPU-SB).
Nevertheless, English is not an official language of Brunei, a status that is reserved
for Malay (Bahasa Melayu). The position of English in Brunei is thus problematic if we
reserve the status of Outer Circle countries for those where English has an official role.
In practice, however, the use of English in education and in legal domains, the widespread
knowledge of English and the use of English as a lingua franca to communicate with the
large expatriate worker community, and inter-ethnically between Malay and non-Malay
Bruneians, all support English in Brunei as ESL rather than EFL. As a direct consequence
of the high level of Malay-English bilingualism, code-switching has become a common
linguistic phenomenon, both in informal interactions and in social media domains. For
many Bruneians, Brunei Malay-English code-switching is an unconscious and unmarked
feature of their language, as in many bi- and multilingual communities elsewhere (Li
2007; Ng & Wigglesworth 2007).
The articles in this special issue present current research into developments within
and around Brunei English. They also reflect the fact that despite the conservative forces
of MIB, Brunei, like its Southeast Asian neighbours, is experiencing a time of flux and
change brought about by the forces of modernisation and globalisation. Cable television
and the Internet can be found in most Bruneian homes, while tech-savvy youths navigate
the cyber-world of social networking, blogging and YouTube with ease. To provide a
comprehensive understanding of Brunei English and its different dimensions, the articles
have been grouped under four sections: (1) the sociolinguistic background; (2) the
linguistic features of Brunei English; (3) discourse features; and (4) creative writing.
Finally there is a bibliography, compiled by the co-editors, which offers a comprehensive
listing of previous studies on English in Brunei.
Under ‘Sociolinguistic background,’ the articles by Paolo Coluzzi and by Gary Jones,
offer both an update and new information on Brunei English. Coluzzi’s article breaks
new ground by using a linguistic landscapes approach and methodology for analysing
language choice and use in signs found in one of the main streets in Bandar Seri Begawan,
the capital city. Jones provides an update on the role of English in the Brunei education
system. He compares government and private schools and reports on the attitudes of
teachers, parents and other stakeholders.
The second section, ‘Linguistic features of Brunei English,’ comprises four articles on
phonology and grammar. The first article by Nur Raihan Mohamad and David Deterding
offers an overview of research findings on the pronunciation of Brunei English, mostly
focusing on segmental features, including rhoticity. This is followed by Debbie Ho and
David Deterding’s article which reviews research into Brunei English grammatical features.
Both these articles attempt to identify features that are unique to the English of Brunei,
as well as those which are also found in neighbouring Southeast Asian Englishes. The
C 2016
John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Introduction: English in Brunei Darussalam
495
other article in this section is Ulrik Gut’s article is on suprasegmental features, specifically
the intonation patterns found in questions asked by Bruneians in conversations with other
Bruneians. Her findings are of wider interest since she investigates whether the prosodic
features reflect the influence of Brunei Malay through L1 transfer, whether they are closer
to British English as the purported target model for Bruneian learners of English, or whether
they resemble the patterns found in neighbouring Englishes such as Malaysian English.
The two articles in the section ‘Discourse features’ both contain analysis of textual data
from the social media domain, in which English and Brunei Malay coexist. According
to Clynes (2014), Brunei Malay (cakap barunay, kurapak barunay) is a vibrant, rapidly
expanding variety which expresses the dominant Brunei Malay ethnic identity in the
country. This variety of Malay language is referred to in Alex Henry and Debbie Ho’s
article, which investigates code-switching in interactions between local buyers and sellers
on Facebook, and in the article by Nurdiyana Daud and James McLellan, whose data come
from Facebook status updates. These two articles complement each other without overlapping: both use data from Bruneians’ Facebook pages, and both investigate patterns of
language choice and code-switching, but they differ in terms of the analytical frameworks
used. Henry and Ho’s analysis draws on a combination of genre-based move structure and
systemic textual analysis (under the umbrella of systemic functional linguistics) which
is applied to a corpus of sales transactions conducted through Facebook. In the article
by Nurdiyana and McLellan, Bruneians’ Facebook status updates are analysed in terms
of relational maintenance strategies and cross-gender variation in code choice, emotive
language and emoticons, and the use of abbreviated spellings in Malay and English.
The study of Brunei English would be incomplete without an analysis of its aesthetic
and literary dimensions. Bruneian literature in English is still at a nascent stage (Chin
2007; Kathrina, Chin & Jukim 2016), but there are ongoing developments that contribute
significantly to our understanding of the language situation. After all, as social and cultural
texts, literature is revealing of the negotiations and transformations in the linguistic
landscape that include resistance against the hegemonic narratives of the nation. This is
seen in the last two articles in the final section, ‘Creative writing and literature,’ which
offer new research on the intersections between language and literature. Grace V. S. Chin’s
analysis of Bruneian women’s creative writing in English as an emergent minor literature
connects gender and language, showing how women’s writings in English potentially
resist the state imperatives of MIB in works of fiction that employ bilingualism, or
multilingualism, to convey ‘an alternative vision of heterogeneous diversity’. Kathrina
Mohd Daud, on the other hand, examines the growing genre of Bruneian horror stories in
Cyberspace and how their use of colloquial language undermines the rigid boundaries of
MIB with their ‘disengagement of the religious from both the cultural and the political’.
For all the authorities’ attempts to preserve Malay identity and culture through
exclusionary tropes, the articles here reveal ongoing linguistic negotiations and practices
in the social spaces that go beyond MIB prescriptions, demonstrating that Brunei is a
dynamic and vibrant ‘glocal’ space that is ever-evolving. We thus invite readers to make
further connections between the local Brunei context and the wider global context.
Finally we would like to express our sincerest thanks to the Editors of World Englishes
and to the anonymous reviewers for their unstinting support and constructive suggestions
throughout the process of preparing this special issue. We also gratefully acknowledge
the important contributions made by Charlotte Choo and Christian Teo of Nanyang
Technological University (NTU), Singapore.
C 2016
John Wiley & Sons Ltd
496
James McLellan and Grace V. S. Chin
REFERENCES
Chin, Grace V. S. 2007. Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam: A comparative study of literary developments in
English. Asian Englishes 10(2). 8–29.
Clynes, Adrian. 2014. Brunei Malay: An overview. In Adrian Clynes, Michael Boutin & Peter Sercombe (eds.), Advances
in linguistic and cultural research in Borneo: Studies in memory of Peter W. Martin, 153–200. Phillips, ME: Borneo
Research Council.
Index Mundi. 2015. Brunei population. http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/brunei/population/. (28 January, 2016.)
Jones, Gary. 2012. Language planning in its historical context in Brunei Darussalam. In Ee Ling Low & Azirah Hashim
(eds.), English in Southeast Asia: Features, policy and language in use, 175–187. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kathrina, Daud Mohd, Grace V. S. Chin & Maslin Jukim. 2016. Contemporary English and Malay literature in Brunei: A
comparison. In Noor Azam Haji-Othman, James McLellan & David Deterding (eds.), The use and status of language
in Brunei Darussalam: A kingdom of unexpected linguistic treasures, 241–251. Dordrecht: Springer.
Li, Wei. 2007. The bilingualism reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
Ministry of Education Brunei Darussalam. 2009. Sistem pendidikan negara abad ke-21. Bandar Seri Begawan: Ministry
of Education.
Ng, Bee Chin & Gillian Wigglesworth. 2007. Bilingualism: An advanced resource book. London: Routledge.
Noor Azam Haji-Othman. 2012. It’s not always English: ‘Duelling aunties’ in Brunei Darussalam. In Vaughan Rapatahana
& Pauline Bunce (eds.), English language as hydra: Its impacts on non-English language cultures, 175–190. Bristol:
Multilingual Matters.
(Received 2 September 2016)
C 2016
John Wiley & Sons Ltd