Abstract
This chapter focuses on the phonology of Brunei English, particularly its consonants, vowels, and intonation. Initial voiceless TH is realised as [t] in a little over half of tokens at the start of words such as ‘thought’ and ‘threaten’, final [t] is regularly omitted in phrases such as ‘fist in’, and about half of Bruneians might be classified as rhotic. In evaluating the correlation between the last of these features with the other two, it is found that there is no evidence that rhoticity in Brunei is perceived to be a non-prestigious feature of pronunciation. For the discussion of vowels, about one quarter of the speakers merge the long and short vowels in ‘feast’ and ‘fist’, and lack of reduced vowels in function words such as ‘of’, ‘that’ and ‘had’ is very common. Spelling pronunciation is common in Brunei, especially with the occurrence of [ɒ] in the first syllable of ‘company’. Finally, there is a brief consideration of rhythm, stress placement, and the occurrence of a final rising tone.
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Deterding, D., Sharbawi, S. (2013). Pronunciation. In: Brunei English. Multilingual Education, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6347-0_3
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