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This paper discusses how the concept of “bilingualism” can be used to reflect changes within Bruneian society since the 1940’s. It argues that within the context of a linguistically diverse population, the various indigenous groups of Brunei used to speak their own traditional languages, but eventually learned to speak the language of the politically dominant Malays. The Malay language became a necessary additional language, hence leading to a population which could speak their own languages, alongside the Malay language. But the rise of schools teaching in English in the 1970’s began to sow seeds of a different kind of bilingualism, encouraged by language shift processes among ethnic minority groups.