its definitely a LANGUAGE.

thanks to Ali for the fantastic article or should i say, explanation. Below is the exact thing he wrote in his email..

It comes to my mind that, seeing Bahasa Tutong and translate it into English, shall we use the word ‘language’ or ‘dialect’? Once I described Bahasa Tutong as dialect in this blog’s chatbox. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the main difference between dialect and language is that, dialect is a form of language which is used in a specific region or by a specific social group. While language is the system of communication used by a particular community or country.

I had the chance to ask Dr. Norazam Hj Othman, Deputy Director of Language Centre, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, concerning the usage of language or dialect in applying it to Bahasa Tutong. He supplied me with a study done by Prof. B Nothofer in 1991. The conduct of the study was based on a 'code' (generic term for language/ dialect/ variety) is a dialect, which it must mean that it is a dialect of a larger group of languages. So this is based by differentiating Bahasa Tutong with Standard Malay. Nothofer argued that for a code to qualify as a dialect of a language, the benchmark of cognate (similarities) percentage should be 80%. If a code does not reach this point, then the code is considered a separate language on its own. The outcome was, Bahasa Tutong only achieved 38%. While Bahasa Murut, Bisaya and Dusun all score low in percentage.

Therefore Tutong, Belait, Bisaya, Dusun and Murut are all languages in their own right, which is why Malay speakers do not understand them easily unless they learned to speak these languages.

On the other hand, Kedayan Malay, Kg Ayer Malay, Standard Malay and Brunei Malay are all dialects of the Malay language because they are all about 95-99% cognate. Also Malay dialects are Malaysian Malay, Indonesian Malay, and Singapore Malay. These all belong in one linguistic family. In fact even Tagalog is Malay.

Noarzam also informed me that, probably by the usage of ‘Bahasa’ in local contexts, which does not differentiate between ‘language’ and ‘dialect’, as a result, confusion occurs among layman.

Done by: Ali Idris

keep warm people, Salam.

Nakalai~