History, culture and heritage? TikTok does it best for Gen Z – they’re using it to teach traditional, indigenous or less mainstream languages

TikTok users are using the social media platform to share and promote to the world traditional, indigenous and less mainstream culture and languages

In Canada, a Cree student posts about her Indigenous language, while two Papua New Guineans have been posting videos of a language of East New Guinea Highlands

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Ms Lisamarie Wia (right) and Emily Papa started creating TikTok videos to teach people about their language of Engan. Gen Z users are using the app to teach traditional, indigenous and less mainstream languages. Photo: TikTok/@Emmalishous

Lisa Lim has held professoriate positions at universities in Singapore, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Sydney, and Perth, including as Head of the School of English at the University of Hong Kong.

Published: 8:15am, 2 Apr 2023

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”.

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. Photo: Shutterstock

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.