Number of Speakers
Out of the estimated total population of Brunei, which currently stands at about 434,000 (World Population Review, 2018), Minority Rights Group International (2018) reports that the Dusun people account for about 6.3%, although exact figures are difficult to obtain (Bernstein, 1997). A majority of the Dusun people live in the Tutong District (Asiyah, 2016), although some can also be found in several areas of the Belait District (Aini, 2007).
Kershaw (1994) notes that many Dusun speakers have shifted to using Brunei Malay, while recent studies (e.g. Fatimah & Najib, 2015) confirm that Brunei Malay seems to be increasingly popular among the Dusun community. This is not surprising as Brunei Malay is generally used as the lingua franca between the various ethnic groups in Brunei (Martin, 1996), and nearly fifty years ago Brown (1970, p. 4) observed that there was an on-going process of the minority ethnic groups in Brunei decreasing in numbers “through the movement of their members to classification as Malays”. There is a growing concern about the Dusun language gradually becoming extinct as younger Dusun speakers often have poor competence in the language (Fatimah & Najib, 2015), and, on a scale of 0 to 6, Noor Azam and Siti Ajeerah (2016) estimate the ‘vitality rating’ of Dusun to be just 2. Indeed, Brunei’s once linguistically diverse community is experiencing a transition towards homogeneity (Noor Azam & Siti Ajeerah, 2016). Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD) now offers courses on the Dusun language to students and also to the public in an effort to revive and maintain the Dusun culture and language (Najib & McLellan, 2018). It remains to be seen how effective such efforts will be in preserving the Dusun language.
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