How Social Media Is Rewriting the Way We Speak

A deep dive into algospeak, TikTok linguistics, and how Gen Z and Gen Alpha are rewriting the rules of communication.

Author

Shira Lazar
July 28, 2025

I was listening to NPR the other day and heard this 24-year-old Harvard linguist and creator Adam Aleksic talking about something that felt so on point.

His debut book Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language just dropped, and honestly, it’s wild to think about how much social is shaping the way we communicate.

We all knew social media was changing culture. What I didn’t fully realize is how deeply it’s changing our language, too.

And while Gen Z (born around 1997 to 2012) helped accelerate this shift, it’s especially Gen Alpha (2013 and up) that’s growing up with it as their default. This isn’t just slang, it’s a whole new language system unfolding in real time.

Aleksic also joined Kara Swisher’s podcast to trace how algorithms, moderation, and money have collided to create a new dialect. The gist? Platforms incentivize certain behaviors, creators adapt to survive, and the language follows them offline.

If you’ve spent any time on TikTok, you’ve seen it.

Words get softened, scrambled, or replaced with emojis to avoid being flagged. “Sex” becomes “seggs.” “Suicide” becomes “unalive.” “Rizz” becomes a whole personality type. The watermelon emoji signals Gaza. The grape emoji becomes code for sexual assault.

One of Aleksic’s more viral examples: TikTok suppresses words like “kill,” so creators swap them out. That’s how we ended up with “unalive,” originally a Deadpool meme. Now, kids are writing school essays about Hamlet contemplating “unaliving” himself. That’s algospeak in action.

It’s not just about censorship. It’s about strategy.

Creators know a trending word can push a video into the algorithm’s fast lane and brands know it too.

He breaks down a great example with the word “preppy.” If you’re older Gen Z or Millennial, you probably think of Ivy League, Ralph Lauren, and crisp button-downs. But for middle schoolers on TikTok, “preppy” now means neon smiley-face tees and glittery accessories. Why? Because TikTok shops saw the term trending and built entire storefronts around the new definition to game the algorithm.

He also gets into what some people call “brain rot,” but not in the way you might think. It’s not about being dumb but more of a meme-forward aesthetic where certain phrases or sounds get repeated into absurdity. Think: inside jokes, intentionally weird captions, and low-effort text-to-speech trends that somehow go mega-viral. It’s nonsense by design, and it performs.

And no, it’s not always cute. Aleksic devotes a chapter to how incel and manosphere language has crept into middle school vocab. Words that used to live in Reddit threads or niche forums are now showing up in hallway conversations. It’s easy to say “that’s just how slang works,” but today’s algorithms speed up that process—and sometimes give the wrong stuff a megaphone.

There’s also the question of credit. Aleksic references Kayla Newman, aka Peaches Monroe, who coined “on fleek” on Vine back in 2014. The phrase went viral, brands made millions, and she didn’t make a dime. By the time she was able to trademark it, the trend was already over.

And we’re still seeing that dynamic play out. Take Jools Lebron, whose “very demure, very mindful” TikTok voiceover became a viral catchphrase. But before she could trademark it, someone else did—sparking backlash, a now-deleted response video, and a scramble to secure her rights after the fact. She’s since filed her own trademark applications, but it’s a reminder that even in 2024, creators are often late to claim ownership of the language they help shape.

It’s kinda wild how much social media is changing the way we talk. I used to hear a word like “rizz” or see the Gen Z stare and think… what even is happening? Now, it all clicks.

We’re not just using social media. It’s using us, clearly. Every emoji, euphemism, or “random” trending sound is part of something bigger. Language isn’t just evolving anymore. It’s being engineered by platforms, optimized by creators, and sold back to us in the algorithm.

The wild part is that we’re all in on it. And yes, watching language evolve in real time is cool. But it also makes you wonder who’s really in charge of how we speak.

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