Diphthongs?

Words such as pantai (‘beach’) and pulau (‘island’) can have a final diphthong. However, just as with Standard Malay (Clynes & Deterding, 2011) and Brunei Malay (Deterding & Ishamina, 2017) this diphthong can only occur in word-final position, so it should be treated phonemically as a monophthong followed by a glide, /aj/ or /aw/.

Unfortunately, the orthography in DBPB (2006) makes no distinction between a word-final diphthong and two separate vowels, so the spelling of pantai [pantaj] and hai [haʲi] (‘day’) both end with ‘ai’, even though the realisation of this final vowel is distinct, being a single syllable in pantai but two syllables in hai.

In the phonemic transcription below, we show them as /aj/ (one syllable) versus /ai/ (two syllables). In The North Wind and the Sun passage, we can note a distinction between /aj/ in sampai (‘until’), in which the /aj/ is a single syllable, and /ai/ in matahai (‘sun’), in which the /ai/ is two syllables.