Growing up in the UAE within a household that had a deep reverence for Persian culture led to Arabic, Farsi, and English constantly battling for a place in my mind. I realized early in my childhood that some emotions and sentiments were better encoded in a particular language. Whenever my father would get agitated with my sister and me, he would scold us in Arabic. However, when Eid festivities were bustling, the family almost exclusively spoke in Farsi. Effective communication at home often meant using the three as efficiently as possible, and it was typical for most spoken sentences to include terms from each language. Sometimes when talking to my parents, I would even use the grammatical structure of one language and the vocabulary of another.

I never had any formal education in Farsi, and so I was only able to communicate with it orally. Because I never spent time thinking about concrete written structures in the language, I felt like I had much better control of the language as I could manipulate the structures of the words to my liking. Although my parents often spoke in Arabic to each other, I rarely used it in the household. My Arabic education, very different from that of Farsi, was instead heavily based on learning grammar, spelling, and writing essays in school. In The Information, James Gleick describes the phenomenon of the African drums that talk: A communication system that used drums not as a form of code, but a poetic exchange that included tonality and emotion.

My relationship with Farsi was similar to the way of the talking drum. I spoke the language without any knowledge of code for my lexicon, but instead a deeper appreciation for the emotion that the sound of the words evoked in my head. As I transitioned to employing this conceptual framework on technological platforms, starting with BBM and MSN Messenger, and more recently WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, I was able to find new ways of describing how I interacted with language online.

The transition between English, Arabic, and Farsi had always been very seamless in my mind, but this was harder to reproduce with written texts. And so, to overcome this, when chatting online with friends I’d write predominantly in English with sprinklings of Farsi transliterations and “arabeezy”, a portmanteau of A’raby (Arabic) and Ingaleezy (English), that describes Arabic transliteration with numbers that represent letters not present in English.

The talking drum was one of the earliest forms of technology. It was a combination of resources and resourcefulness; It used the means available at that time to increase the efficiency of communication. As we encounter newer standards of technology, we will be faced with similar tasks of combining the history and learnings of communication and the power of technology to advance how information and knowledge are articulated and discoursed in increasingly efficient ways.