For those of us who are nowhere close to being Gen Z, “TikTok” may have more likely got you thinking about the song “My Grandfather’s Clock”, where it stood “Ninety years without slumbering, tick tock tick tock …”
The recent grilling of TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi at a US Congressional hearing has, however, put TikTok on everybody’s radar.
TikTok’s origins can be traced back to Musical.ly, an app released in the United States in 2014, and Douyin, launched in China in 2016 by tech company ByteDance.
Both allowed users to share short videos and live-streams, often featuring music in the background. The Chinese word “douyin” literally means “shake/shaking sound”.
ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in 2018, and rebranded it for the international market, calling it TikTok. Its name is a play on “tick tock”, the onomatopoeic rendition of a clock ticking, and a phrase for countdowns as well as minute-by-minute action.
Its logo is a quaver, a musical note – for the specifics of the app – whose shape represents the lower-case letter “d”, for the original name of the service, Douyin, still used in China.
Notwithstanding the growing security concerns facing TikTok, the app does in fact – like other social media platforms – afford opportunities to support less mainstream language varieties.
In Winnipeg, in Canada, a Fox Lake Cree Nation university student started posting videos about learning Cree – one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in Canada – to the Manitoba Indigenous Cultural Education Centre’s TikTok page in 2020.
Initially, the student did it to connect with the community during the Covid-19 lockdown. The initiative continued even after the centre reopened – not only because the videos had proven extremely popular but also because they garnered a wider following beyond the community itself.
Similarly, two young Papua New Guineans have been posting on TikTok videos of Enga, a language of the East New Guinea Highlands – the presence of such online language learning resources is especially important for languages without much published material.
Even once covert languages are not so secret any more thanks to TikTok. Tut, or Tutnese, a clandestine form of communication created by African slaves in 18th century America, when teaching slaves to read and write was prohibited, is seeing a revival as a result of TikTok videos.
For transmitting more traditional, indigenous or less mainstream culture and language, creating a connection to heritage and community, as well as promoting wider awareness and understanding, TikTok seems to hit the mark for Gen Z.