Gyat, mewing, sigma—decoding Gen Alpha's slang

Ever heard the term "Chicken Jockey"? Ask any teen and they will tell you about this famous phrase from the Minecraft movie, which became a social media meme and is now being used as an exclamation to describe a chaotic and clumsy person or situation.

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Slang such as this has complicated the communication between millennial parents and Alpha kids. Today, you might find each member of a family viewing a screen, but the content they consume is very different. As a result, their pop cultural references are dramatically different.

An everyday conversation between an Alpha kid and their clueless parents, peppered with words such as mewing, sigma, ohio, would, in fact, be a perfect way to describe a modern-day Chicken Jockey situation.

Tony Thorne, language consultant, Centre for International Education and Languages, King's College London, finds the genesis of such slang of deep interest, and its deep connection with the content that this generation consumes.

"Gen Alpha is active on YouTube (short-form video by preference), Instagram and Tik Tok where they can participate, emulate, or react to influencers, content-creators and individual Tik Tok celebrities," he explains.

Gen Alpha slang, like Gen Z's, differs from that of older generations in being a language that doesn't just arise "naturally", escaping from the streets or disseminated by mainstream movies, TV and the music industry.

"The language they use has often been generated deliberately by techbros, influencers and microcelebrities, who are not just trying to communicate but to gain prestige. The slang they use also differs from older versions in ways which are interesting to linguists like me: the 'words' are not just words but operate virally like memes and they are 'multimodal'-made up not just of writing or sounds but accompanied by images, sound effects, references to other messages, in-jokes, puns, and more," he says.

Digital meet-cutes, virtual dates, and relationship advice from AI bots... this is a generation that lets technology facilitate and intervene in relationships