Scripting English in Jawi: English disguised in Arabic-based ‘Tulisan Jawi’ in Brunei’s linguistic landscape

Although Brunei has historically been influenced by various cultures, languages and religions, Islam is an important defining feature of Brunei, and Malay represents a salient marker of the country’s religious, sociocultural and linguistic identity. Traditionally, the Arabic-based Jawi system was the go-to script for writing Malay in the Malay world. Now, while Jawi is considered ‘endangered’ in parts of the Malay-speaking world, Jawi is alive and well in Brunei, representing a (co-)official script. This linguistic landscape (LL) study points towards a ubiquitous phenomenon in twenty-first-century Brunei, where elements written in the Arabic-based Jawi script tend to be phonetically transliterated from English in a context of postcolonialism, modernity, business and globalisation. This is in contrast to the common practice/expectation that Arabic-based scripts are supposed to write local languages (e.g. Malay, Urdu, Wolof). This study shows the inroads made by English in Brunei’s twenty-first-century LL, where the traditional Islamic identity and local Malay-ness are mixed with overriding global influences. This study provides insights into the nature and status of Jawi in twenty-first-century Brunei. The study offers further evidence on the existence of ‘multiscriptal English’ that has been increasingly documented in recent years, where the powerful English is disguised/(re)contextualised in various languages/scripts.