How Digital Platforms are Shaping the Slang of Tomorrow's Generations

“Enjoy your 1% fanum tax.” 

“Damn, you are so skibidi.” 

“Level 1 gyatt... embarrassing.” 

“Was she mewing in that picture?”

“He was so Ohio.” 

“British beans on toast is the sigma.” 

“An absolute rizzlord.” 

“Yeah Thomas is coming, he’s checkmarked, don’t worry about it.” 

If any of the above sentences meant anything to you, there is a good chance you are an eleven year old boy who is chronically online. Or, you are impressively on top of today’s rapidly evolving youth culture and internet slang.  

All of the above quotations are real sentences written or uttered by users on TikTok. The bolded terms are just a few from a plethora of words that are becoming known as “Gen Alpha slang”.

Generation Alpha (“Gen Alpha”) – majority children of Millennials– comprises children born between 2010 and 2024. Gen Alpha members are young children and early teens growing up in an era impacted by a global pandemic, socio-political division, international conflict, exponential technological acceleration and increasing digital interconnectedness. The repercussions of Gen Alpha’s unique, hyper-digital upbringing remain largely unknown. One known result, however, has been the rapid development of an ever-evolving slang vocabulary. 

It has long been known that slang terms derive from subcultures, countercultures and youth cultures looking to articulate the version of the world that they live in. As technological access and use increases around the world, today’s digital platforms are providing new spaces for these cultural groups to generate and disseminate new expressions faster than ever before. 

Many of Gen Alpha’s slang terms are emerging from a specific section of our digital landscape: online gaming. Phrases like “fanum tax” and “gyatt”, for example, were coined by popular gamers known as Fanum and Kai Cenat. More specifically, slang terms are increasingly being developed and popularized by videogame live streamers who play and chat with virtual audiences via platforms such as Twitch, Discord and Roblox. 

Take “skibidi” or “skibidi toilet” for example. The phrase itself comes from a YouTube shorts video series that tells the story of a fictional war between two made-up parties– Skibidi Toilets and Cameramen. The series is produced by a YouTube channel by the name of “DaFuq!?Boom!” which boasts a whopping 44.3 million subscribers. Their break-out video featured an earworm-y song that is a mashup of “Give It to Me” by Timbaland and “Dom Dom Yes Yes” by Biser King with new lyrics that introduced the world to the skibidi toilets. The video has 48 million views on YouTube alone and has likely garnered millions more views across other digital platforms, not least of which being videogame streaming sites like Twitch where the song has been repeatedly referenced and quoted by gamers and game-watchers over the last year. 

Platforms like Twitch have completely accelerated the pace at which slang can catch on and become integrated into internet subcommunities. Twitch, like most other popular digital platforms today, is characterized by its reliance on user-generated content, the ability to create user virality and the active participation of all users through likes and comments. On these types of platforms, one person’s new concept for a slang word can reach and become integrated into the lives of hundreds, millions, or even billions of people around the globe almost instantaneously. 

Beyond that, these digital platforms have also contributed to the increasingly rapid integration of modern youth slang into offline vocabularies and mainstream society. In recent months, we have witnessed new Gen Alpha slang terms permeating nontraditional physical spaces like the Australian Parliament. One young American gamer’s slang word could not reach an Australian senator 8,000+ miles away so rapidly without the power and affordances of these digital platforms. 

Today, slang is far from a static, region or community-based concept. Instead, it has become a dynamic, global, ever-changing phenomenon that is piloted by digital platforms and the users and content creators behind those platforms. 

Whether you are a fellow paranoid young person feeling one internet trend away from becoming a historical artifact, or you are an adult in need of guidance and translation, I can confidently say there is hope for you, too. Some of my favorite creators that I am turning to for help in understanding our fast-paced digital culture, and to prevent the dreaded decline of my relevance at age twenty-one, are: (i) Mr. Lindsay (a special education teacher who creates explanatory social media content pertaining to new slang terms brought into his classroom by students); (ii) Adam Aleksic, aka Etymology Nerd (a Harvard linguistics graduate and working linguist who educates the public through social media content); (iii) Madison Kircher (the internet culture reporter for The New York Times); and (iv) Know Your Meme (a website that documents prevalent viral internet content and evolving trends). 

The new reality of our current digital age: needing digital platforms and content creators to understand and translate our digital platforms and content creators. Now that is “brainrot,” as the Gen Alpha kids would say.