Brunei Culture, English Language: Textual Reflections of an Asian Culture Located in the English-Language Output of Bruneians

Abstract

This paper uses an insider-outsider approach to identify and analyse some syntactic, lexical and discoursal features of English texts produced by Bruneians, in order to investigate how Bruneian users of English seek to maintain their own cultural identity when communicating through this “global” language. Sections of the paper discuss anaphoric and exophoric reference, tense choice and avoidance, collocations and style-shifts, and how texts, specifically letters to newspaper editors, are structured in terms of their informational content. The theoretical underpinning for this paper includes notions of politeness and face, the ownership of English, and approaches to the discourses of English as an international language and the “worldliness of English” adopted by Pennycook (1994). The validity of the notion of discourse transfer is critically examined in the conclusion.

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