Misunderstandings in Brunei EnglishOn 8 March 2017, Ishamina Athirah presented the inaugural FASS Graduate Seminar, discussing her PhD research on 'Misunderstandings in international communication in Brunei English'. Analysis of a corpus of about 3.5 hours of recorded conversations between Bruneians and people from elsewhere yielded a total of 152 tokens of misunderstanding.
The figures do not add up to 100%, as there was substantial cross-classification, with two factors sometimes contributing to a token not being understood. For example, one speaker said 'wharf ships' which was heard as 'water shift'. Pronunciation issues included the spurious [t] on the end of 'warf' and also the final /p/ of 'ships' pronounced as [f]; but in fact, the listener did not know the word 'wharf', so lexical factors are also implicated. One interesting finding was that it was often the pronunciation of the listener that caused the problem, for example when a listener from France heard own friends as 'home friends', even though there is no hint of an [h] at the start of 'own'. The variable use of initial [h] typifies French pronunciation of English. We hope that this graduate seminar will be followed by weekly presentations in which FASS research students share their research with their colleagues and thereby obtain valuable feedback about what they are investigating and also gain experience in presenting their findings. |
2023 News Stories
2022 News Stories
2021 News Stories
2020 News Stories
2019 News Stories
2018 News Stories
2017 News Stories
- AUN Students Week 2017
- Screening of Short Films
- World GIS Day 2017
- Internship at Kaleidoscope
- Historicize or Historicalize?
- Enhancement in Kalabadha
- Field Trip to Api-Api
- Research Students in Kampong Ayer
- SRE-YMAC Experience
- Detecting Forest Fire Risk Areas in Brunei
- Internship at Cat Haven
- Best Paper Award
- Climate Change and Bangladesh
- Climate Change and Tuvalu
- Field Trip to Katimahar
- Field Trip to Kampong Ayer
- Internships by Geog and Env Students
- Impact 2017 – A Greater Spectacle
- FASS Seminar by Dr Krista Wiegand
- 2nd FASS-CAMES Run
- ACT-2017 Exhibition
- Word Stress in English
- Misunderstandings in Brunei English
- Breaking the Habit
- Earth Trek Borneo Exhibition
- FASS-CAMES-run
2016 News Stories
- Book Launch
- Brunei Malaysia Forum
- World GIS Day 2016
- Undergraduate Art Exhibition
- Visitors from Chulalongkorn
- Discovery Year at Unikal
- FASS Seminar by Dr Shafi Noor Islam
- FASS Seminar by Paul He
- Geog/Env Internship
- Conference in South Korea
- Under the Ground
- Festival Sastera 6th
- Spectacle 2016
- DY at History Centre
- RS and GIS Projects
- FASS Seminar by Frank Dhont
- ACT Exhibition
- Geography and Environmental Studies field trips
- Minggu Generasi Genius
- Presentation on Singlish
- History Symposium
- FASS Seminar by James McLellan
- Ceramics Exhibition
2015 News Stories
- FASS Seminar by Adam Jaworski
- ESEA-18 Conference
- International Seminar on Education
- Stage Drama: Santun Bahasa
- Drama Performance: Love.Fabric.Life
- Dialog with Universiti Malaysia Terengganu
- International Art Moves Exhibition
- Discovery Year in Arizona