Multiglossia in Brunei
Variables such as age, gender, level of education, and profession naturally give rise to further sociolects in the Standard Malay of Brunei. Poedjosoedarmo (1996: 38) contrasts the formal speech of government officials, which she describes as having the ‘staccato syllable timed rhythm of Standard Indonesian’, with the stress-timed speech of newsreaders.
Still, the Standard Malay of all formal genres in Brunei shows the least divergence from other varieties of Standard Malay, while that used in less formal contexts (such as in the radio patter of disc jockeys, or the speech of teachers in classrooms) at times diverges quite radically.
Typically, communities in which Standard Malay is used are multilingual and multiglossic (Sneddon 2003). In Brunei, while Standard Malay dominates in the domains of education and administration, in informal contexts Brunei Malay is strongly preferred, often with a considerable amount of code-mixing. The overall mix is further complicated by influences from other Malay varieties, from TV, films, radio and the Internet, so that many Bruneians are at least passively multi-dialectal, often understanding even the informal registers of Indonesian and Malaysian films and TV dramas. Finally, in a country where education is bilingual in Standard Malay and English, with English dominating from the fourth year of primary school, English increasingly constitutes a rival code in high diglossic contexts and even, for some speakers, in low diglossic contexts. As a result, English has influenced the syntax, lexis, phonetics, and phonology of both Standard Malay in Brunei (Poedjsoedarmo 1996) and Brunei Malay (Maxwell 1990).