"Styling The Ah Beng In Online Communication" – A SAAL Talk

Co-organised by the School of Arts and Social Sciences and the Singapore Association for Applied Linguistics, the 'Styling the Ah Beng in Online Communication' talk was held on 20 April 2012 at UniSIM, attracting a total of 30 attendees. The speaker, Dr David West Brown, who is the coordinator of the University Town Writing Programme at the National University of Singapore, gave an interesting lecture on Singaporean youth in popular online forums. It sparked a lively discussion on the stylisations or 'everyday' performed language and the youths of today.

The talk was based on the speaker's study on a corpus of posts collected from two forums frequented by Singaporean students. The data suggested that posters often use stylised dialect representations to perform or to ventriloquise the identity of an ah beng. Implicated in such performances were sometimes complex negotiations of class, gender, and ethnicity.