Overview:
Social media has rapidly reshaped language for Gen Alpha, making slang evolve faster than ever, and while teachers do not need to adopt student vernacular, understanding it is essential for building trust, preventing miscommunication, and sustaining meaningful classroom connections.
Social media has only accelerated the emergence of new words, and also shortened the shelf life for adolescent vernacular. Kids in every previous generation have cringed just the same when their mothers, fathers, uncles, and teachers try to copy their sayings. It was groovy and far out in the 1970s. Buggin’ in the 1990s. She ate in the early two thousands, and I’m dead in the twenty-tens. Then there was the resurgence of no cap in the 2020s. But no other generation — not millennials or even Gen Z — has been fully raised in such a digital world that has influenced their linguistics quite like Gen Alpha, kids born between 2010-2024. Now, more than ever, kids are speaking in even more abbreviated and shortened lingo influenced by social media, culture and their peers, according to a 2025 study. Think of sus and rizz which have been shortened from suspect and charisma. While teachers do not need to start sounding like preteens and teenagers to communicate with the Gen Alpha, they should keep up to date on the latest slang or they risk losing connections to their students, which are needed for a healthy learning environment.
Today’s youth speak the language of the Internet. Meme-inspired sayings like skibidi and 67 were unofficially coined by the Gen Alpha. These sayings often make no sense and originate from viral Tik Toks. Teachers have a hard task at hand keeping up with fast-changing slang. Language changes so fast now that by publication, the words mentioned here could be passé. That said, educators should understand the language of the time so they can communicate with their students. If you do not understand what your students are saying, you are not investing time talking and learning about them.
Those connections are needed to cultivate a safe and nurturing classroom environment. Case in point, last year, I witnessed Ms. Moore* at my private school in New York, who was on lunch duty supervising kids in the quiet room, a space where talking should be done in whispers. On this day, the room was far from quiet. Ms. Moore got into a back and forth with a middle schooler I will call Nate* who is familiar with the dean’s office. I was in the room next door when I heard yelling. When I got next door, I tried to make sense of the scene.
The crux of the argument was that Nate wanted to get a second serving of lunch, and he felt other students were allowed to return to the cafeteria before him. Ms. Moore didn’t want Nate to leave with his friend, fearing that they would only wander the hallways, so Nate had to wait. Nate didn’t like this. He said as much, but in lingo that reflected his community and age.
“Stand on it. Stand on it.” He screamed at the teacher from his desk when she threatened to give him a flag (our school’s form of punishment).
At this point, another teacher, Ms. Kelsey* , had heard the yelling and also entered the room. The two teachers were clearly confused. What was Nate saying? They recognized the aggressive tone and volume of his voice as something disrespectful but the words were meaningless. The eighth grader might as well be speaking another language. Such is the case when schools have teacher populations that do not mirror the student body.
These teachers did not live in Nate’s community and probably have never visited it. However, that should not stop them from forging connections with their students to understand their interests and slang. The incident reminded me of a time when I was 16. I went on a trip from my home in Hawaii to Europe with my high school Sierra Club. With a group of Hawaii local kids, we were in a gift shop in Heidelberg, Germany when the store keeper started yelling. We understood none of what she was saying, only registering the tone and her pushing us to the door. She wanted us to leave. We left.
After the bell rang, the teacher at my school was dysregulated, but more than anything she was confused. What was Nate trying to communicate? She asked me if I knew. He might as well be speaking German, while she spoke English.
“He told you to stand on it. Because you said you’d give him a flag.”
“Stand on it?”
“Like standing on your business.”
“What?”
“Standing on it means like if you say something, do something. Like go ahead, take care of business.”
She gave me a confused stare.
Standing on business has long roots in the Black community, but the phrase became popularized in modern times thanks to comedian Druski and rapper Drake who explained to listeners on his song “Daylight” that he is …
Ayy, standin’ on business
Standin’ on business
Standin’ on business
Standin’ on, ooh
Kids speak the language of their communities and the social media platforms they frequent. Teachers often come from different neighborhoods and generations. This is not to say that teachers need to start advertising their “lit lessons” to show their students how cool they are. As educators, we can stay true to the lingo of our generations, while also keeping up-to-date on new linguistic changes used by preteens and teenagers, which experts say are evolving faster than ever because of social media and teenage girls. In the Twenty-Twenties young girls led the charge in creating new lingo. Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist who authored, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language attributes this to young women being “more socially aware, more empathetic, and more concerned about how their peers perceive them.” McCulloch calls “humanity’s most spectacularly open-source project.”
Trends influence how youth speak, but also other languages. Among the newly added words in 2025 most (22%) come from Japanese; 15% from French; 10% Latin; 10% Spanish; 8% Italian; and 8% Greek. The title for the word of the year went to 67, according to Dictionary.com which honored the phrase that can mean “so-so,” “maybe” or just a nonsensical remark to any question. In August of 2025, Dictionary.com added some 1,235 words to its catalog.
We should embrace new slang used by the youth and allow its use in our classrooms. Even more so, we need to show students how we value their contributions to humankind’s largest open-source project by learning their lingo so we can maintain valuable connections.
*an alias
