Brunei English in the World

Abstract

The current status of Brunei English can be considered from the perspective of the five-phase model of the development of postcolonial Englishes proposed by Schneider (Postcolonial English:Varieties around the world. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007), and it is suggested that Brunei English may be in phase three, which means it is at an earlier stage in the process of evolution than Singapore English. However, perhaps we should instead consider how it participates in the evolution of global English, with features shared around the world, and maybe some of the trends observed in Brunei are contributing to the development of English. In terms of intelligibility, loss of length distinctions for vowels and non-standard placement of sentence stress might be problematic, but most of the other features of Brunei English pronunciation are outside the Lingua Franca Core (LFC) of features that teacher should focus on. While it is important for teachers to raise awareness about appropriate usage in different circumstances, learning to accommodate to the needs of a range of speakers seems the most important skill that teachers should focus on. Finally, we might observe that many of the trends observed in Brunei English are shared by other varieties of English around the world, so Brunei seems to be contributing to the continuing development of the language.KeywordsNative SpeakerInternational SettingVowel LengthPedagogical ImplicationEnglish UsageThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.