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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/31114
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I am thinking about setting my story in a postapocalyptic world where all art and literature are gone, and people are mostly illiterate. People lost the ability to formulate deep thoughts, became incapable to talk to each other and to express things clearly. A general "stupidity" infected the whole land. The main consequence is that characters speak very poorly, without proper grammar, and mostly with simple phrases, misused words or plain grunts. This will be important in the end, where they will discover a group of survivors who maintained a fine level of language and culture.

The problem is that all my characters, for 2/3 of the novel, would speak in a very dull way, such as:

"Hey"  
"What"  
"Did u do the thing"  
"What thing" "that thing there"  
"Uh?"  
"Cmon!"  
"Ah that - yes, yes"  
"Umpf"

I imagine a world where the main catastrophe is represented by the loss of language.

But will a story full of these dialogues be sustainable? Won't it be too boring or dull for a reader? Can it be understandable?

My original idea was to make it a script for a graphic novel, where poor balloons would have made sense. But in a prose novel?

**EDIT** : **from some of your precious answers, I have noticed that I have used the word "illiterate" improperly. With "illiterate" I didn't just mean the incapability to read and write. I mean the general inability to express oneself clearly, to properly use language, to understand complex thoughts and logic.**

Original score: 4