Belait Erotic

The Belait are one of the seven puak jati, the indigenous groups that Brunei's 1961 nationality law names as native to the sultanate, and they are probably the least visible of the seven. Their name is everywhere: a district, a river and the oil town of Kuala Belait all carry it. The people themselves are few. They form a small community concentrated in the west of the country along the Belait River, inland at Labi, and in pockets of neighboring Tutong district, with linguistic relatives just over the border around Miri in Sarawak.

What sets them apart is language. Belait, also called Lemeting or Meting, belongs to the Lower Baram cluster of the North Sarawak languages, a branch of Austronesian. Its nearest kin are Tutong, Miri, Kiput and Narum, not the Brunei Malay that surrounds it, and a Malay speaker cannot follow it. Estimates of fluent speakers run below a thousand, and surveys since the 1990s have ranked it among the most endangered languages in Brunei. Most Belait under middle age grew up with Brunei Malay at home and at school. The old language survives mainly among grandparents and in a handful of villages.

The historical center was Kuala Balai, a river settlement inland from the coast where families lived by processing sago palm into flour, fishing and trading downriver. For a long time it was the main settlement in the district. Then oil was struck at Seria in 1929. The coast filled with company housing, roads and wage work, and Kuala Balai drained steadily toward it until only a few households remained. Within two generations the Belait became townspeople of the oil belt: company employees, civil servants and shopkeepers, living beside Malays, Chinese, Iban and expatriates.

Religion sped the blending. The Belait are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, and in Brunei all seven indigenous groups are legally classed as Malay. Sharing a faith, a national language and a legal category with the majority, many Belait simply describe themselves as Malay in everyday settings, and intermarriage is common. Weddings, funerals, Hari Raya visiting and the rhythm of Friday prayers look much as they do in any Brunei Malay household. What persists as distinctly Belait is quieter: family lines that lead back to Kuala Balai, a vocabulary older relatives still use among themselves, and the word lists and recordings Bruneian researchers have compiled to document the language while its last fluent generation is still here to speak it.