English, Arabic, and Chinese Loanwords in Brunei Malay

. Brunei Malay is a unique Malay dialect spoken not only in Brunei Darussalam, but also in neighboring parts of Borneo. Although extensive data are available on lexical borrowings in Standard Malay and Indonesian, surprisingly, Brunei Malay has not been studied in this regard. Our paper aims to fill this gap by identifying English, Arabic and Chinese loanwords in the only available dictionary ( Kamus Bahasa Melayu Brunei ). We had looked into the linguistic distribution and word classes of the borrowed lexis, and understood that the main borrower was Arabic, followed by English; however, only a few words of Chinese origin could be found in the corpus. The most prominent word class was nouns, with a significantly lower number of verbs and adjectives. In the last part of our paper we are going to give some examples for usage of these loanwords in context.


Lexical borrowing and its types
Lexical borrowings are one of the most noticeable consequences of cultures and languages coming into contact (Hoffer, 2005). In most of the cases, the core vocabulary, i.e. that small set of words referring to the most basic human activities (like to eat, to drink or to sleep) and direct or directly observable surroundings (animals, sun, moon, forest, river…), is less likely to be borrowed. Usually, new lexical items will be adopted, when the receiver language lacks these words to express objects, concepts or activities that have been introduced by another culture (the donor). Interestingly, nouns are the most frequently borrowed part of speech; the reason being, according to Myers-Scotton (2002, cited by Haspelmath, 2008, that "they receive, not assign, thematic roles" (agent, patient, location…), hence, "their insertion in another language is less disruptive of predicate-argument structure (ibid.)". Adjectives (hungry, thirsty…), adverbs (here, tomorrow…) and basic verbs (like the ones above), on the other hand, are more likely to be part of the core vocabulary than nouns. Verbs, furthermore, tend to have an elaborate system of valency (types and numbers of arguments), and, occasionally (at least in some languages) intricate inflections, that might impede their incorporation into other languages. It is important to highlight that there are languages that are more receptive towards lexical borrowings than others. English, for instance, incorporated a large number of words from other languages like Latin (abdomen, pious…), French (theatre, caramel…), Germanic languages (dollar, geist…); whereas Chinese has a considerably smaller number of lexical borrowings.
In theory, there are four possible ways to borrow lexical items from one language into another: 1. Loanword is a word that has been adopted in a language (or languages) from another language in a way that its original meaning is (more or less) preserved, e.g. Arabic ‫الكيمياء‬ al-kīmīā' -English alchemy. It should be pointed out that loanwords are different from foreign words, because loanwords go through a three-tier assimilation process (in sound shape, grammar, and in orthography) to become a new lexical item in the borrowing language (Bussmann, 2006).

2.
We are talking about a loanshift, when a native word adopts a new meaning due to the influence of a foreign language / concept, e.g. the English word Easter (Ēastre in Old English), now referring to an important Christian festival, was originally the name of the pre-Christian era goddess of spring.
3. Loan blend is very unique type of borrowing where one part of a compound will be kept as in the source language; however, another part of the compound will be translated into the borrowing language, e.g. English gumtree -Barossa German (spoken by the descendants of German settlers in South Australia) gumbaum, in which gum-is borrowed from English, but the second part of the compound -baum ('tree') will be translated into Barossa German (Richards & Schmidt, 2010). 4. On the other hand, loan translation (often referred to as calcque) is an exact morphemeby-morpheme / word-by-word rendering of a word or an expression into another language, e.g. Latin omnipotens ('all mighty') -English almighty (ibid.).

The Malay language and its loanwords
Malay (Bahasa Melayu) is a Western Austronesian language with approximately 300 million speakers. It is spoken in parts of Maritime Southeast Asia (called also Nusantara), primarily in Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and in Indonesia (where it is called Indonesian); however, it is widely used in Southern Thailand and, to some extent, it is understood in other countries of the region as well. In the pre-colonial era, Malay served as the lingua franca of commerce in this archipelago, not only for the inhabitants of the many islands, but also for foreign traders (cf. Alisjahbana 1976: 32, cited by Lowenberg 1985. Based on stone inscriptions found in Sumatra, Java and in the Malay Peninsula, it is safe to say that during the Srivijaya Empire that existed from the seventh to the thirteenth century A.D. (!) and that, from its capital in today's Palembang in Southern Sumatra, Indonesia, controlled large parts of the archipelago, Old Malay was already a quasi-official widespread language in the region (ibid.). Although contemporary regional varieties of Malay might show significant differences (in pronunciation and vocabulary in particular), they are still more or less mutually intelligible. In the Preface to his book, A Manual of the Malay Language, Maxwell (1914: V) states the following: "The construction of the [Malay] language and the general body of words remain […] the same, but in every state […] there are peculiar words and expressions and variations of accent and pronunciation which belong distinctively to it." In Kelantanese Malay, which is spoken in the state of Kelantan in the northeastern part of the Malay Peninsula and in the neighboring southern provinces of Thailand (Pattani, Songkhla, Narathiwat, Yala), for instance, the word-final syllables -an, -am and -ang will be pronounced as a long, often nasalized closed-mid / near-front -e: sembilansembile ('nine'), makanmake ('to eat'). Similarly, in Kelantanese Malay there is quite a number of distinct words that cannot be found in the majority of Malay dialects: piti(h) ('money'), ambo ('I'). In general, we can assert that Malay has adopted a substantial amount of foreign lexis.
Chinese supplies some lexical borrowings respectively; which, interestingly, apply to elements of the Chinese culture for the main part, e.g. loteng ('upstairs floor'), kongsi ('society'), (to)pekong ('idol'). Furthermore, a significant number of English, Portuguese and Dutch loanwords, too, typically referring to European concepts and articles, show themselves in . These are only a few examples; however, they show the flexibility of Malay to incorporate foreign elements into its lexis, when it is needed, i.e. when novel concepts are introduced to its speakers.

Brunei Malay and some of its differences to Standard Malay
Brunei Malay (Bahasa Melayu Brunei), the Bruneian dialect of Malay, is spoken not only in Brunei Darussalam, but also in neighboring Malaysia, particularly in the districts Limbang, Lawas and Miri of Northeastern Sarawak, in certain parts of Sabah's Interior Division (Beaufort, Kuala Penyu, Sipitang) and on Labuan Island (Clynes, 2001;Jaludin Chuchu 2008: 7 pp.). However, the impact of the Malay dialect in question is further-reaching: In a paper, Collins (1996) has proven the suggestion of Wolff (1976) Malay has notably only three vowels, namely: a, i and u. Thus, words like berat ('heavy') or benar ('correct') will become barat and banar when pronounced. Also loanwords will contain only these three vowels. Moreover, in faster speech, weakening or even the complete deletion of h might occur in the onset of words or in the coda of word-final syllables: hantar ('to send')antar, boleh ('to be able')buli. Morphologically, verbs can occasionally have both the locative suffix -i and the causative / benefactive suffix -kan at the same time: panas-i-kan ('to heat up something for someone'), bali-hi-kan ('to buy something for someone') (Jaludin Chuchu 1994Chuchu , 1997cf. Clynes 2001: 29). As for syntax, we can observe a strong tendency to move the verb to the left periphery of the sentence, changing the word order from subject-verbobject (SVO) to verb-subject-object (VSO).

Research Method
Brunei Malay and its varieties (the high register and the spoken varieties), like Standard Malay and other Malay dialects too do, have a significant amount of loanwords. These lexical elements were borrowed during contacts with other cultures and languages; and, ultimately, after lexicalization (and assimilation in terms of phonetics-phonology, morphology, etc.) they were absorbed into the native Brunei Malay vocabularyto that extent that the majority of native speakers do not recognize them as borrowings any more. Whereas a big number of publications on loanwords in Standard Indonesian and Standard Malay is available (Jones, 2007), this is unfortunately not the case for Brunei Malay. To our knowledge, apart from a blog entry listing a few loanwords from English (Deterding, 2015) and an article on the adoption of English idioms (Syamsuar & Aditya Rizkiana 2013), no other work addresses the topic of lexical borrowings in Brunei Malay. Our study aims to fill this gap by identifying English, Arabic and Chinese loanwords in the lexis. We hypothesized that we would find predominantly nouns and that the other word classes would be less in numbers (or eventually absent from the corpus), although we expected to find some verbs as well. Due to the fact that English, Arabic and Chinese came into contact with Brunei Malay in different times and contexts, the lexical borrowings from these languages range over different topics as well; however, a detailed thematic "mapping" would go beyond the scope of the current paper. It is sufficient to say that loanwords from English stem from the last two centuries when the country was a British protectorate between 1888 and 1984; hence, oftentimes, they are related to technical innovations. As for Arabic loanwords, for the most part, they are Islamic terms (concepts, acts of worship, names of days Pustaka Brunei (Language and Literature Bureau) which is currently available in its second edition (published in 2010) and contains some 15.000 lexical entries. Thus, this work of reference was chosen as the corpus for our study, in which we tried to identify loanwords. In some cases, the dictionary labels English loanwords as Ig; in other cases, the Ig index is missing. Arabic and Chinese loanwords are not labelled as such. In our analysis of the data, we focused on (1) percentage distribution of loanwords between the three languages and on (2) which word class these items belong to. In latter case, we experienced some difficulties, because some words can fit into two categories, e.g. urin ('orange') could be, depending on the context, a fruit (noun) or a color (adjective)in such cases, we considered these words as nouns. To help the reader make himself a picture of the usage of these lexical borrowings in everyday contexts, a few examples with sample sentences in Brunei Malay and their English translation will follow our analysis. To enable further work with the data, in the appendix of our paper we make the complete list of English, Arabic and Chinese loanwords in Brunei Malay accessible.

Findings
In total we found 503 words that could be recognized as loanwords from Arabic, English and   According to the data, 313 words or 62.2% of the words were borrowed from the Arabic language, 181 words or 36% were borrowed from English and 9 words or 1.8% were borrowed from Chinese. All these words can be categorized into a few word classes such as below:

Conclusions
In our study, we could identify more than 500 loanwords from English, Arabic and Chinese in Brunei Malay. Whereas Arabic and English together represented 98 % of the lexical borrowings, Chinese supplied solely 2 %. These lexical items, like it is often the case in other languages as well, are mostly nouns with a considerably lower number of verbs and even less adjectives; other word classes were not represented in the corpus. These words are already fully lexicalized, i.e. their pronunciation (only a-u-i vowels, predominantly consonant-vowel units, avoidance of long consonant clusters), orthography and usability (suffixation to form certain word classes) are "localized", and native speakers do not consider them as foreign words in the lexis any more. English loanwords are often from the technical domain, Arabic borrowings are related to religion and religious practices (Islam), whereas Chinese loanwords refer to food or elements of the Chinese culture. In the future, this study could be extended to lexical borrowings from Sanskrit and other languages as well, to understand how these loanwords shaped the landscape of Brunei Malay.