Language, Culture and Identity in Diaspora

What is the relationship between culture, identity and language? Is it the language we use most frequently? Is it our parents’ or grandparents’ language? Is it the language of our childhood? Is it the routine customs and rituals that we are used to? How strongly do we feel about these issues? This is what this project aims to find out.

In this project, many researchers including linguists, historians, interactive media specialists, computer engineers, scientists and museum curators from within NTU and relevant external collaborators will come together to tackle these questions. From an interdisciplinary collaboration, an interactive experience for the general public was developed. Users of the application will be guided through a process where they will aim to create a word profile of a character in the given application. They will be presented with word collages consist of keywords that are important to the characters’ cultural identity. However, the user’s aim is to make clever guesses of what the cultural profile of the character will look like. They also have the opportunity to compare the profile they created with the profile created by the character herself. Through this application, we aim to both further our understanding of the relationship between language, culture and identity and increase awareness of our heritage. This project will also provide valuable insight about social perception of language and identity within and across language groups.