The vowels of Brunei English

Abstract

This paper provides an acoustic description of the vowels of Brunei English (BrunE). Ten female BrunE speakers were recorded reading The North Wind and the Sun (NWS) passage. The formant values of the eleven monophthong vowels and the rate of change (ROC) of the diphthong /eI/ were measured and compared with the data of seven British English (BrE) speakers and also the results of similar studies on Singapore English (SgE). It was found that BrunE shares some common features with SgE as both groups do not distinguish between /i˜/ and /I/, /e/ and /æ/, and /f˜/ and /#/. The high back vowels of BrunE, however, are unlike the SgE vowels. Whereas in SgE /u˜/ and /~/ are fully back, in BrunE these two vowels are fronted, so they are similar to the vowels of the BrE speakers. The data also shows that BrunE /f˜/ is more open and less back than BrE /f˜/. For /eI/, the average ROC for Bruneian speakers is considerably less negative than that for British speakers, which indicates that in BrunE, just as in SgE, this vowel is less diphthongal than its counterpart in BrE.