From 'sus' to 'rizz,' parents of Gen Alpha kids try to keep up with slang
When Natalie Boe listens to her two young sons talk with each other and their friends, she said it can be like listening to a different language.
"It's a challenge for parents," Boe told "Good Morning America" of wanting to understand her sons but also drawing the line at being called "bruh." "It's really a fine line of saying, 'I want to understand what you're talking about without being too involved, too nosy, trying to look too cool.'"
As a mom of a 13-year-old and 11-year-old, Boe finds herself right in the middle of parenting Generation Alpha, the generation of kids born between 2010 and 2024. As the first generation to be born entirely in the 21st century, Gen Alpha kids have been online or exposed to social media from a young age, influencing the everyday language they speak and use.
They are a generation that uses words like "Ohio," -- code for weird -- "skibidi," -- which can mean either cool or bad -- "rizz" -- shorthand for charisma -- and "cap" -- to lie -- online and in conversations at school and home.
"Every week, there's a new word. Every week, there's a new phrase," Peter Shankman, a dad of an 11-year-old daughter, told "GMA." "Whatever it is, they're doing it. And yeah, it's a bit much."
While Boe, Shankman and fellow parents learned slang from friends, movies and television, their kids now in Gen Alpha are picking up slang words at rates not seen in previous generations, thanks largely to social media, experts say.
"Instead of getting slang from your buddies at school, you're getting slang from TikTok, you're getting slang from Twitch, you're getting slang from all these other inputs, so things spread a little faster than they used to," Jessi Grieser, associate professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, said of Gen Alpha, noting that manufacturing is also faster today than in past generations so slang also appears faster on products like T-shirts and toys.
With Gen Alpha, not only are they on social media themselves, but their parents, mostly millennials and Gen Xers, are too. TikTok and other social media platforms are full of videos of parents of Gen Alpha kids either trying to understand or criticizing the slang, the latter of which Grieser said happens across generations.
Why understanding slang and its origins matters
In addition to its roots in social media, Gen Alpha's slang also includes words that have been created by others before them.
Terms like "bet" and "no cap," for example, have their roots in African American Vernacular English, or AAVE, a dialect historically spoken by Black Americans.
The words' popularity now among young kids of all races is an example of what happens often with language, where a marginalized group's language is co-opted by a group that is bigger or has more power, according Grieser.
"The point of in-group language is to be able to cohere your group and to distinguish your group from groups that are around you, and that often happens when one group has less power," she explained. "So, when you are a minoritized racial group, when you are a minoritized gender identity, when you are a more minoritized sexual orientation identity, you're going to use language in ways that allow you to connect to the people who are part of your group and exclude the people who aren't part of your group precisely because they have all of the social power."
"The problem is perpetually going to be that those groups are going to create things that the people who have all the privilege of power think are neat," Grieser said. "This is a cycle that we've had forever."
Grieser pointed to Gen Z's heavy use of LGBTQ and AAVE terminology -- words like dragged, snatched and kiki -- popularized by TV shows like "RuPaul's Drag Race," as an example of how Gen Alpha is not the first -- nor the last -- generation for this to happen.
She said that's why it's important for parents and adults to not only try to understand the definitions of Gen Alpha slang, but even more so, its roots.
Grieser said she encourages adults and kids to be curious about language and have conversations about where words come from.
"There's not a line in the sand where we're committing some sort of language sin against a group," Grieser said. "But the more we're aware of these processes and how these things work, the more conscious users of language we can be, regardless of what language it is."
How Gen Alpha got its slang
While social researchers and brands analyze Gen Alpha, trying to decipher what makes them unique, Greiser says this young generation is hardly the first to create their own slang.
She said the phenomenon of each generation creating its own vocabulary -- some of which sticks around and some of which is quickly forgotten -- has "existed forever."
"We know that kids in their junior high school, teenage years, as they're starting to develop their own identities and separate from the adults around them, that is a crucial part of their growth, and a major way they do that is through language," Grieser said. "So you will always see an increase in slang and in-group term use as they're doing that identity formation. You will also see an increase in profanity use among that generation, and all of those are tied to that stage of identity development."
As members of the generation age and enter college and then the workforce, the use of their generational slang starts to disappear, according to Grieser.
While slang like "rizz" and "sus," short for suspect or suspicious, have more obvious origins, others, like "skibidi toilet," may seem inexplicable for people out of the younger demographic.
In many cases, the roots of Gen Alpha slang, including the seemingly inexplicable ones, can be traced back to social media.
"Skibidi," a word that for Gen Alpha kids confoundedly can mean either cool or bad, comes from a YouTube animated series with millions and millions of views.
The use of the word "Ohio" to describe something as weird or "cringe" is said to have come from online memes about the state of Ohio.
Even within social media, Gen Alpha slang comes from many different sources, another way it is unique from past generations who all collectively watched the same TV shows or were on the same social media platform, like Facebook, according to Grieser.
"Skibidi," for example, originated on YouTube and was then memeified across social media platforms and into kids' vocabulary. And instead of hearing a slang word on a TV sitcom that everyone is watching on a Thursday night, a Gen Alpha kid may pick up slang from a stranger on Twitch.
"Increasingly, we're seeing people really choose their specific media," Grieser said, adding, "And so that increasing fracturing is changing the sources that that people are getting language from, and it's a little less unified and a little more creative as a result."
Linguists like Grieser use the term "generational change" to describe that cycle of words popping up and then falling off as the generation ages. Sometimes though, there are words that stick around as some in the generation continue to use them.
Grieser cited words like "rad," "groovy," "retro" and "dope" as examples.
Words that survive the test of time tend to be shortened versions of pre-existing words, according to Grieser, which is why she predicts that "rizz," short for charisma, and “Ohio,” a word that exists outside of slang, may be ones that continue beyond Gen Alpha.
“As someone who grew up in Cincinnati, I'm really curious to see what happens with Ohio,” Grieser said, with a laugh. “But I think that one might also have the ability to stick around, because it's something we've already had, and we're changing the meaning of a word that we have, and those tend to have a little bit more staying power than ones that are just ones that just pop up.”
Editor's note: This article has been updated to reflect and better explain the origins of slang used by members of Generation Alpha.
