Voiceless Plosives
The voiceless plosives of Brunei Malay are unaspirated, as is the case for most varieties of Malay (Clynes & Deterding 2011), as well as Indonesian (Soderberg & Olson 2008).
The initial voiceless plosives in the word list above all have minimal aspiration: for the /p/ in parang ‘machete’, voice onset time (VOT) is measured at 17 msec; for /t/ in taun ‘year’, it is 16 msec; and for /k/ in kali ‘times’, it is 29 msec.
There is a little more aspiration on the voiceless plosives in medial position: the /t/ in yatim ‘orphan’ has VOT of 24 msec, while the tokens of /k/ in wakil ‘representative’ and laki ‘husband’ have VOT of 56 msec and 49 msec respectively.
In ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ passage, all voiceless plosives in both initial and medial positions have minimal aspiration, except for the /k/ in the six tokens of kuat ‘strong’, which has an average VOT of 44 msec. Apart from kuat, the largest value of VOT for /k/ is 30 msec in ngakun ‘admit’. For /p/, the average VOT is 17 msec, for /t/ it is 18 msec and for /k/ (excluding kuat) it is 27 msec, and there is no difference between the results for initial and medial plosives.
The VOT for /k/ in the passage is significantly longer than that for /p/ (t = 7.02, df = 23, p < .001) and also for /t/ (t = 4.32, df = 18, p < .001) but there is no significant difference between the values for /p/ and /t/ (t = 0.2, df = 32, p = .84). Greater aspiration for /k/ than for /p/ and /t/ is similar to what has been reported in other languages, such as English (Docherty 1992), French (Nearey & Rochet 1994), and Chinese (Deterding & Nolan 2007).
Voiceless plosives in final position may be unreleased, as is the case with dapat ‘can’ in the third line of the passage and kuat ‘strong’ in the last line.