LingoLattice

“OK Boomer” is one of the internet’s favorite responses to complaints from older generations. I think it’s valid because it seems like every couple of swipes online, I come across a new comment complaining about how young people are destroying language. Sometimes it’s about texting abbreviations, sometimes it’s about slang, and sometimes it’s about emojis. Recently, I’ve seen complaints about Gen Alpha words like skibidi, rizz, and gyatt. According to the internet, English is apparently on the verge of collapsing and rotting our brains. 

But here’s the funny thing: complaints about language decline are nothing new. Ancient Roman writers worried that Latin was deteriorating. Eighteenth-century grammarians tried to regulate English because they feared linguistic change. In the twentieth century, critics complained about slang and later texting abbreviations. Today, people worry about internet slang and TikTok vocabulary. The details change, but the pattern remains remarkably similar.

Why?

One reason is that language is deeply connected to identity. The way we speak signals our age, community, education, and social group. When younger generations develop new ways of speaking, older generations often feel excluded. Suddenly, conversations that once made perfect sense become difficult to follow.

Think about internet slang. If someone says, “That’s giving main character energy” or “I’m cooked,” most teenagers understand immediately. Someone fifty years older might have no idea what those phrases mean. The language itself isn’t worse; it’s simply serving a different social purpose.

In fact, creating new language is one of the ways groups establish their identities. Teenagers have always invented slang partly because they don’t want to sound like their parents. If young people spoke exactly like previous generations, there would be no way to signal membership in a new generation.

Another reason people think language is declining is that they confuse change with decay. We often assume that the version of language we grew up with is the “correct” version. Anything that comes after feels like a mistake. But from a linguistic perspective, change is normal. Language is constantly evolving.

Consider the word awful. Today, it means something terrible. Hundreds of years ago, it meant something worthy of awe. The word nice originally meant foolish or ignorant. Even the pronoun you was once considered incorrect in situations where thou should have been used. If people had successfully stopped language from changing, modern English speakers would still be talking like Shakespeare, or perhaps not even speaking English at all.

Some of the features people criticize most are actually signs of creativity. Emojis, for example, are often dismissed as lazy communication. Yet they allow people to convey tone, sarcasm, emotion, and social nuance that can be difficult to express through text alone. Internet slang evolves at an astonishing pace because people are constantly inventing new ways to communicate subtle meanings. 

Of course, language change can sometimes create real challenges. Teachers, employers, and parents may worry about whether younger generations can switch between informal and formal contexts. Writing a school paper requires different language than sending a text message. But this isn’t a new problem. Every generation has had to learn how to adjust its language for different situations.

The next time you hear someone say that young people are ruining language, it might be worth asking a different question: what if language is doing exactly what it has always done? Languages survive because they change. New words appear, old words disappear, meanings shift, and grammar evolves. If language stayed frozen forever, it would stop reflecting the people who use it.