From 'rizz' to 'aura farming': Why Gen Z & Alpha slang is just language's next chapter

Among Indian languages, I can attest that Bengali, my mother tongue, has been enriched by the inventive genius of Sukumar Ray, famous for his absurd poems. And not to forget the legacy of our British colonisers, the Hobson Jobson dictionary of “Anglo-Indian words and phrases" is a treasure trove of hodge-podge hybrid words formed by joining English with Hindi, Urdu, Nepali and other South Asian languages.

Moral of the lesson: do not be quick to dismiss weird-sounding coinages as passing fads.

Think of “ghosting" (to abruptly stop communication with someone without any explanation). Not long ago it used to belong to this category of nonce words, but not only is it now part of daily parlance, we are also “spilling the tea" (gossiping) and admiring others for their “glow up" (a positive makeover). As these terms continue to seep into everyday conversation, they are doing more than freshen up our vocabulary. They are becoming short cuts for emotional expressions that once required tone, gesture and nuance to communicate with another.

“As AI gets increasingly baked into messaging apps, it is taking over even basic exchanges and producing templated responses like AI-generated emails do," says Arunava Sinha, professor of practice for creative writing at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana. “Increasingly we will miss the real person behind the message."

As younger generations rely on invented words to carry emotional weight, the consequences of such a linguistic shift are more than meets the eye. On the one hand, a vocabulary refresh is proof of the elasticity of a language, especially its capacity to absorb words from non-literary sources like the internet, social media interactions and colloquialisms. On the other hand, these new additions are rewriting the rules of engagement in formal as well as informal settings. Together, it harks back to an evergreen point of contention: content or delivery, what is key to successful communication?

Speaking Without Words

One of the earliest attempts at answering this question was made by American psychologist Albert Mehrabian, when he ran a series of experiments more than half a century ago. In the 1960s, Mehrabian ran two studies, with 30 and 37 women, respectively, to test the role of emotions and words in communicating feelings and attitudes of a speaker to an audience. On the basis of his findings with this rather limited sample size, he designed a framework, popularly known as the Mehrabian Rule, and explained it in detail in his book, Silent Messages (1971).

The idea behind his framework is counter-intuitive, but it can be summarised into a neat, little formula: the 7-38-55 Rule. Basically, in any act of communication that involves decoding the feelings or attitudes of the speaker, the audience gets the crux of the message being conveyed (93%) from non-verbal cues, such as tone, facial expressions, body language, and so on. Only 7% of the meaning comes from the actual words used.

The catch is that Mehrabian’s hypothesis works in limited cases, only where the feelings of a speaker are involved. However, decades of misreading have turned the 7-38-55 formula into something of an urban legend, a shorthand to decode any communication act. As the man behind the theory himself has repeatedly clarified, it takes much more than non-verbal gestures—curiosity, empathy, emotional intelligence and a whole lot of personal qualities—to form meaningful connections with others.

“So much of it depends on upbringing and access. I feel lucky that in the 1980s, when I was growing up, our mum used to scold us in ‘Shakespeare’," says Preeti Singh, a communications specialist who works with a range of audiences, from MBA students to CXO-level executives. “The way we process language depends on what we read, hear and observe around us. Communication, at the end of the day, is a dance. It is storytelling in action."

It is a fact that Gens Z and Alpha mostly read online, picking up in-jokes and catchphrases that originate in other parts of the world. “We are slaves to the algorithm," Singh says. There is, in general, a shrinking of vocabulary to which even people from older generations are not immune.

Writer Menaka Raman, an older millennial and mother to 14- and 17-year-old boys, concurs that “the emoji has killed the need to have a thoughtful or meaningful reaction." “We don’t offer condolences any more, but the namaste emoji becomes our default," she says. “It’s as though we not only do not have the time to think through our responses, but we are also scared of saying the wrong thing."

To make matters worse, there is an epidemic of “fillers" and Americanisms, empty words that most of us have formed a dependence on, thanks to their ubiquitous appearance and circulation in real life, on the internet and in popular culture. “I set my MBA students a speaking exercise, where we count how many times two people speaking with each other use words such as ‘like’, ‘amazing’, ‘awesome’, ‘okay’, ‘fine’, and so on," Singh says. “Sometimes the number is as high as 25 fillers in a minute."

Given this shrinkage of everyday speech, it isn’t surprising that complex emotions (or the lack thereof) are being compressed into nifty new words. Who wants to be “cheugy" (outdated or cringey) like the Gen Xers, Millennials and Boomers, when they can be “drip" (stylish)?

Vibe Check

It’s easy for us “old people", who preceded Gen Zs and Alphas, to bemoan the erosion of complexity in communication because none of us came of age during the unnatural years of the pandemic, confined to our homes, meeting our teachers, peers and colleagues virtually, through long weeks of lockdown and social distancing. Small wonder that when older Gen Zs joined the workforce, their mindset was tuned differently from their seniors. A 2023 Barclays survey in the UK, for instance, found that Gen Zs are twice as likely (49%) to use instant messaging platforms at work compared to the over-55s (27%).

Alolika Dutta, a 24-year-old poet, agrees that covid did lead her Gen Z peers to turn out as “a relatively undersocialised generation". “I wonder if we may have lower social intelligence, rather than just a strangely higher rate of neurodivergence, though I do understand that people are being diagnosed more enthusiastically now," she says. “I also cannot help notice that we missed out on formative social experiences and that’s bound to impact our lives."

It may not be so strange after all that a whole generation, excluded from the privileges enjoyed by their predecessors, would want to create a niche for themselves, especially if it can be built with something that doesn’t cost anything: internet slang. As Nicole Holliday, associate professor of linguistics at the University of California in Berkeley, told The Guardian last month, “This (desire to invent new slang) is just human development. Part of the psychosocial development of young people is differentiating themselves from their community, from older people, and establishing their own identity."

Every generation has engaged in its own version of this activity. “For the millennials, words like ‘woke’ and ‘cool’ were the currency," says Karthik Venkatesh, an editor and author of 10 Indian Languages and How They Came to Be (2024), a book aimed at young readers. It’s worth noting, he adds, that Oxford’s WoTY 2024 was “brain rot", which was announced shortly after the results of the presidential elections in the US. It seemed to be a fitting choice, marking the triumphant return of Donald Trump to the White House, a President who has contributed nonsensical gems like “covfefe" to the public discourse.

The point of Gen Z lingo, like Gen X- or millennial-speak, is that it is meant to be confined to a select group of users. It’s hard for many of us from the last two demographics to imagine our parents’ generation throwing around words like “cool", “dude" or “bro", just as Gen Zs and Alphas may find us cringe for using these. But “brain rot" or “sus"? It’s best to not trespass on this forbidden terrain if you happen to have been born a long time ago.

As Shyam Anand, Raman’s 14-year-old Gen Alpha son, tells me, “Most of these slangs are used by us jokingly, not in daily conversations. Older people don’t get that we say these words in a comedic way most of the time."

It’s time the rest of the world paid heed to such sound advice.