A documentation of Belait, an Austronesian language of Brunei

Language	Belait
Depositor	Holly Drayton
Affiliation	Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Newcastle University, Universiti Malaya
Location	Brunei Darussalam
Collection ID	0662
Grant ID	SG0715
Funding Body	ELDP, The Leverhulme Trust, Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing page handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/3cedd0c8-64b4-5768-9e38-5552927e2f1g

 

Summary of the collection

This deposit provides a documentary corpus of audio-visual texts in the Belait language, funded by an ELDP small grant in 2022-2023, with additional fieldwork carried out in 2024 supported by the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Leverhulme Trust. The deposited material includes a series of sociolinguistic interviews on language use and attitues; a series of language teaching lessons; elicited responses to picture and video stimuli; a series of parallel storyboard narratives using the Jackal and Crow and Chore Girl stimuli; a range of cultural and historical narratives; medicinal plant description; multi-speaker conversational recordings and musical demonstration. Information about each session is provided in English and Malay.

 

Group represented

The group represented in this deposit are the Belait people of Brunei, the small Islamic sultanate located between two Malaysian provinces, Sabah and Sarawak, on the north coast of Borneo. Speakers of Belait are scattered across a number of discontinuous areas around the country and, as such, do not retain a central location. This is one key feature of the fast decline in the number of speakers, which is estimated to be less than 200 in 2022. The Belait group has now fully converted to Islam and identify as Malay, this means that knowledge of pre-Islamic beliefs and cultural practices is only remembered by the oldest generations, and traditional Belait practices have largely been abandoned. This documentation includes speakers from several dialects: Kuala Balai, Labi, Ba’ong, Tutong(Kiudang), and the Lutong dialect spoken across the border in Sarawak.

 

Language information

The exact nature of the relationships between different mutually-intelligible language varieties in the Lower Baram region is controversial. The Lower Baram subgroup includes around 8 closely-related varieties spoken in Brunei and Sarawak. Different groups have different understandings of which languages are sub dialects of others. For example, recordings beg010 and beg011 included in this collection present the perspective of two Belait speakers that see Belait as the main language, with sub dialects spoken across the border in Sarawak. Conversely, speakers of other varieties, including the Ba’ong dialect in Kiudang and the Lutong dialect in Sarawak, do not consider themselves to speak a variety of Belait. Rather, they consider Belait to be another dialect of their language. Despite these differences, speakers of the Lower Baram varieties generally agree that they speak varieties of ‘the same language.’ Further research is required to better understand how these varieties are related. According to speakers involved in this documentation project, the Belait people originally lived along the Tinjar river in Sarawak. However, conflict with another ethnic group forced the Belaits to migrate downriver, settling in the villages of Kuala Balai and Labi in Brunei around the beginning of the 20th century. Subsequent nation-building initiatives by the Bruneian state has driven a process of ‘Islamicization, Malayicization or Bruneization’ which has encouraged speakers to adopt the national Islamic Brunei-Malay identity, language and religious culture, leading to the current situation where Belait is only spoken by 1-200 of the oldest generations and intergenerational transmission has ceased.

Collection history

Data included in this collection has been recorded during two periods. In 2022 I began interviewing speakers in Brunei, and recorded the first batch of audio and audio-visual files. I returned to Brunei in 2024 to continue the documentation. I will be gathering more data and further documenting the valuable linguistic and cultural knowledge of Belait speakers until 2025, so more updates will be added throughout the next year.

Collection contents

As of 2024, this collection contains:
– 13 hours of audio-recorded language learning and elicitation sessions,
– 8 detailed sociolinguistic interviews on language use and language attitudes.
– A series of parallel narratives collected using the Jackal and Crow storyboard and the Choregirl storyboard.
-A series of picture descriptions
– A series of audio-visual recordings describing medicinal plants and their uses
– Historical narratives
– Descriptions of cultural practices relating to marriage
– Pre-Islamic beliefs
– Personal histories
– Musical demonstration
– Multi-speaker conversation

 

Acknowledgement and citation

A special thank you to Noor Alifah Abdullah for the many hours spent teaching me Belait. Thanks also to Dr Yabit Alas for help in getting the documentation project running. Thanks to Hazwani Husli for help arranging meetings, and working on elan files.

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:

Drayton, Holly. 2022. A documentation of Belait, an Austronesian language of Brunei. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/4cede0p9-32c4-5967-9e38-5882928e2g3f. Accessed on [insert date here].