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If you don’t have a child, a younger sibling, or a career in a child-related field, there’s a good chance you’re out of touch regarding the language of this generation’s youth.
The members of Generation Alpha are officially in elementary and middle school, and as such they’re starting to contribute to the cultural zeitgeist. Whether or not they’re contributing anything of actual worth is still up to debate, but one thing is for certain: Our language will never recover. That much is clear based on even a casual perusal of TikTok, but it becomes clearer with each passing day.
The English language — and, I assume, every other language out there — has been insurmountably changed (and perhaps ruined, depending on your perspective) by the contributions of our next upcoming generation. They’ve contributed a number of new terms to the growing lexicon of language, and not a one of them makes a lick of sense — even to people familiar with the rantings of prepubescent psychopaths.
Take, for instance, TikTok user @madewith_hope, an art teacher with all the experience required to dissect the unintelligible rantings of Gen Alpha. As it turns out, the language of the next generation is largely just TikTok brain rot, for better or for worse, and Hope highlighted just that across a mesmerizing minute-long video.
Expertly concocting slime as she speaks, the TikToker unpacked several common phrases her fourth graders rattle off that continue to go over her head. Among them are “gyatt,” “sigma,” “Ohio” and “Utah,” and, of course, the perpetually baffling “skibidi toilet.”
I have a 12-year-old brother-in-law, and I can confirm that more than 50% of what exits his mouth sounds like a completely different language. I heard the latter phrase on Hope’s list a number of times the last time I saw him, and no number of supposedly “clarifying” conversations helped me to better understand its meaning.
Thankfully, there are some more coherent Gen Alphas out there, and they’re willing to shed some light on these fresh phrases. Another video, this time from Damon Sharpe, sees as his daughter clarifies a string of Gen Alpha phrases, a number of which were present in Hope’s video. Its helpful to know that “sigma” is a good thing — why does it seem bad? — or that “mogging” means you look better than someone else.
And all the references to the state of Ohio? Theories vary, but the one with the most traction is that it derives from the prevalence of weird events that take place “only in Ohio,” hence the Buckeye State being synonymous with “odd” or “creepy.” This impression was furthered last year by the wildfire viral success of CG5’s single, appropriately titled “Only in Ohio.”
The evolution of language is as old as language itself, and it’s a perfectly natural part of a changing society. According to a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, “language is transformed as it is transmitted from one generation to the next,” and the “process of linguistic replication is imperfect,” which often leads to the development of new terms and phrases.
That’s exactly what we’re seeing with Gen Alpha, and they’re far from the first generation to add new terms, seen as confusing to us old folks, to the cultural dialect. We did it too — those long, long years ago — and each new generation will do the same. Its a natural part of the human experience, and even if it takes us awhile to properly understand, its all sigma in the end.