SWF 2019: Whither English Language
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Writers at the Singapore Writers’ Festival discuss the impact of evolving language on creative writing. PHOEBE RAE reports
Imagine talking to the uncle you see once every year. You don’t talk to him like you text your friends, right? I doubt he’d be able to keep up with the arsenal of acronyms or memes we use. Clearly, how youths talk and what they talk about are vastly different from what your uncle is used to.
Yet, we are technically using the “same” language. The only difference is a couple of decades. How then did language, the backbone of communication, evolve to become a gaping chasm between you and your uncle?
That exact question (among others) was posed to writers of various backgrounds during the 22nd edition of the Singapore Writers’ Festival, one of Asia’s premier literary events with this year’s theme being A Language of Our Own.
“My generation has lived through relatively cataclysmic events like the separation from the Federation and Independence... [we] lived in interesting times and produced poetry from there,” poet, playwright and novelist Robert Yeo, 80, told the crowd at the Nov 2 Generation Gap panel.
Another panellist, poet and critic Daryl Lim Weijie, 30, noted that although Singapore is now much more stable, he believes “the current generation also lives in interesting times in Singapore”.
With information at the tip of our fingers, it’s hard to navigate the torrential rain of messages we get every day. Especially for politics, memes can contextualise and shape one’s view of the world. “Memes can give denser issues a simpler language that might reach out to Gen Z’s,” spoken word poet and author of Gaze Back Marylyn Tan, 21, shared.
The popularity of memes is also interesting to point out. “They find commonalities in our experience,” said Annette Lee, 28, a content creator for Singapore’s official meme page SGAG, during Memetics 101 – The Study Of Memes programme.
What better way to relay meme language than through texting?
Accessible, instantaneous, and simple, it transformed and created new forms of language like acronyms and GIFs. Yet, it also erodes languages at the same time.
“When texting started, not all languages were available so romanisation of multiple languages happened,” said Marylyn during the Texting And The Englishing Of World Languages programme.
“Texting in Chinese takes a long time... then there are the inclusions of particles such as 呀(yà), which needs to convey informalities,” added Kelly Chan, 30, city manager of weekly language exchange Mundo Lingo Singapore. “Sometimes the best way to substitute is to use emojis,” she said, explaining that it was much easier and faster for communication.
In fact, writing doesn’t even need you to come up with words at all anymore. With the rise of artificial intelligence and generative texts, poems can be written entirely by computers – putting a whole new spin to writing.
“I essentially found a python library for tracery which allowed me to play around with different ways of constructing poetry prompts,” said poet, educator and editor Jacob Sam-La Rose, 43. He shared about dabbling in computer-generated texts in The Poem As Machine programme.
Yet at the end of the day, it’s not entirely a computer’s work as raw material still comes from the author himself. “It’s still a very human frame because it is not a machine making works for machines but for humans,” Jacob explained.
