An Acoustic Investigation of the Segmental
and
Suprasegmental Features of Educated Brunei English Speech
Salbrina Binti Haji Shabawi

 salbrina@gmail.com   

salbrina@fass.ubd.edu.bn
 

   
    Profile   

Salbrina is a lecturer at the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. She holds an Honours first degree in Linguistics from University College London and an MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of York. In her spare time, she loves to blog which is her way of keeping in touch with her friends and family back home in Brunei.

 Research Interests: Phonetics of Brunei English, both instrumentally and by auditory means.

Abstract

Previous phonetic studies on Brunei English (BrunE) have mostly relied on impressionistic analysis and to date, only one published work has included spectrographic analysis of data. An instrumental analysis of BrunE is a nascent area of research and there is certainly a dearth of acoustic-based, descriptive studies on it. In order to begin to fill this gap, this thesis uses a collected corpus of recorded spoken data to analyze, both acoustically and by auditory means, the English spoken by Bruneians.  

The study will look at both segmental and suprasegmental features of BrunE using data collected from eighteen female Brunei Malays reading The Wolf Passage. The results are then compared with the data of twelve female Singaporean Malays. This is to find out how the two English varieties are alike or similar as previous literature on Southeast Asian varieties have claimed that the English spoken in the region share similar features.