Keeping it colourful with language and identity

Recent reports from the AI frontier indicate that one of the models spontaneously generated a language of its own.

Scientists called it a “human” language although I am not quite sure it qualifies as such. Depending on your perspective this could either fill your heart with delight or trepidation.

Babel still has an overpowering hold on the imagination. I suppose the thing with the spontaneously generated AI language is that for it to live it needs to be spoken, and I am not sure speaking is what it is doing unless the language becomes the lingua franca for AI — the place where Midjourney and ChatGPT commune outside basic code.

I raise all of this because I had lunch with Eben Keun, who is the director of the Pendoring Awards, which celebrate and encourage large language models of the South African variety.

We meet at Don Armando, the stylish Argentinian steak house beneath Mastrantonio in Illovo. It is Mastrantonio’s passion project and I pick it because I think Eben will appreciate the sleek design and the brilliant steak. In the event he is more tempted by the chicken but I make up for it with gusto and ease my carnivorous tendencies with sides of freshly sautéed spinach, broccoli and chimichurri. It strikes me that food is a language model of sorts — it communicates culture with every bite.

There are other things to celebrate than just pure languages and the old kind of textbook and dictionary versions. We are about the living iterations

—  Eben Keun, director of the Pendoring Awards

Eben first got involved with Pendoring as a competitor — he entered and won a prize with his company Breinstorm Brand Architect’s work on a Vodka brand campaign in Afrikaans — “Net Vodka”.

“It was actually a very graphic thing with the idea that it doesn't matter what language you speak, you'll be able to understand. So there were these pictograms, and it was this whole thing about this very pure vodka that you wouldn't mix with anything else.” 

The evolution of the awards reflects our South African preoccupation with identity and meaning. “Initially it was only for Afrikaans advertising — 21 years later they asked us [Breinstorm] to take over the management of the project.”

From an award that started out supporting and fostering creative work in Afrikaans it has evolved into a serious attempt to nurture all our indigenous languages.

“For the last seven years, it's been our job to transform this thing from what used to be Afrikaans advertising awards to all indigenous language communication awards. So there's still advertising categories as well, but now we give awards for book design and publication design. As long as it follows the golden rule — it must be at least 70% in one or more of the indigenous languages in South Africa.

“So we kind of look even beyond the official traditional languages. We've had entries in Koi languages and with the release of the TV series Queen Modjadji — that's a language that people speak but it is not an official language recognised as one of the 11.” 

According to my searches, it is spoken in the Mopani and Vhembe regions of Limpopo, and by some in Thembisa and Alexandra townships in Gauteng. KheLobedu is sometimes characterised as a Sepedi dialect, but it could be argued that it is a distinct language of the Balobedu tribe under Queen Modjadji.

Eben grew up in Pretoria and went to a deeply Afrikaans primary school. By the time he got to high school he was desperate to spread his cultural wings. “It was '94 and art school changed my life. I had a breath of fresh air and started understanding what diversity does in society.” 

A gap year in Scotland, where it took him six months to decipher the Glaswegian accent, was followed by a degree at AAA and Vega where he met his business partner Ilan Green and they have been Breinstorm-ing ever since. 

We discuss the fatigue that sets in when you have been speaking in tongues all day. “In previous campaigns that different agencies did for Pendoring they kind of played on the fact that by a certain time of day your English airtime runs out. And it's interesting. I mean, we've discovered that speakers of indigenous languages share the same issues of what it is to live in a world that's not your primary language, it's a tricky thing.”

Eben says the idea of purity in the spoken word is not realistic. “There's a lot of mixing of languages where people use different bits. So for the awards it doesn't have to be ‘pure’ language, because we don't subscribe to that thing of the standard language.

“It is whatever people are speaking. And so it's a creative celebration. There are other things to celebrate than just pure languages and the old kind of textbook and dictionary versions. We are about the living iterations.

"It's quite cool that media has changed over the last few years, because if you ask anybody in advertising, they'll tell you that nobody has got budgets for advertising but they've got money for other things, whether it's activations or making podcasts or sponsoring projects.

“Like in our design category, we've got book cover design or the entire publication design. We've got the audio arts, there's all sorts of categories for the podcasts and short forms and different things that people are making. It becomes quite complex with the adjudication of this, because we need a panel of 30 adjudicators so they can cover all the languages and can explain cultural nuance to the fellow adjudicators who don't necessarily speak those languages.”

Ultimately our languages are the way our cultural currency operates. “So most places and societies today in business are forced into English for practicalities. Even when we have our meetings as the vendor report, it's English that's the lingua franca. So we all fall for the lingua franca, and it's almost like language has shifted to something that we need to hold on to to make things more colourful, otherwise we lose our identity, and our languages carry a lot of our identity in South Africa.

“It's interesting to see how people like Sho Madjozi, for instance, transcend global boundaries and present a culture in a young and energetic new way. Nobody says ‘Oh, can you sing that in English?' Because it's part of our identity, so the role of language potentially changes a little bit, but we still want those languages around.

“We still want to be creative in our languages, but it's becoming a little bit like fine art, really, to be able to do that well. It's the creative expression of language and how innovative people are in the language. You don't get a Pendoring for a translated piece of work. You get a Pendoring for something that's conceptualised with deep cultural nuance and insight.”