"What Is Verity?" Examining the Evolution of Language in the 21st Century, By Emaad Arshad

Text found outside a classroom window at Froebel Education Centre, Senior Campus

“You're W aura mogs all your opps.” 

While this may seem like complete gibberish to older generations, Gen Z and Gen Alpha can easily decipher these words with minimal thought. There is no doubt that language does evolve over time, but the 21st century has driven an unprecedented shift in modern vocabulary, where words change rapidly and their meanings are constantly warped to fit the times.

Many words have lost their original meanings due to distortions from the younger generations. “LARP” is a prime example of this phenomenon as it originally meant “live action role play” where a person or group of people pretend to be characters from a form of media. Today, however, the term has been reformed to also include pretending to be knowledgeable of a certain topic. For example: if a person pretends to know a video game, their friend will often call them out by asking “why are you larping?”. The distortion ultimately stems from the era of ‘larp kaisen’ a tiktok event where fans of the anime jujutsu kaisen pretended to know the show, allowing for the word larp to become extremely altered. 

But slang hasn't just been altered, rather it has been completely overhauled, during the early 2000s the most common way to express amusement was by saying “lol” or lmao”. Whereas, the younger generations more commonly use the phrase ‘im dead’, and even more simply use the skull emoji as a reaction for something humorous over text to express the same reaction. This was also done with the words ‘rad’ or ‘wicked’ which were extremely popular during the late 1990s and early 2000s, while in the modern day these reactions have been replaced with the term ‘aura’ which is used as a term of respect or admiration for an event, individual and nearly all other things or concepts

There are a wide multitude of reasons for these words coming into existence or their meanings being changed. Firstly, many members of younger generations don't want to be seen as cringe or uncool, instead they wish to be portrayed as ‘nonchalant and niche’ or in simpler terms: mysterious. Thus they reject the previous norms and instead create their own words which is seen as a much better way to portray the same idea or new idea. The constant evolution of the English language also occurs due to the psychological concept of herd mentality. People naturally follow the larger crowd as they believe it to be right, therefore when something is branded as embarrassing to say, people naturally avoid it. Consequently, new words which are branded as cool are treated as the norm due to the same psychological condition

Ultimately, the most popular reason is the development of mass media and the ability to easily communicate through social media. The pioneer of English, Shakespeare is only regarded as such because of the large reach of his plays. Therefore all the words he created became popularised. But in the modern day, an Instagram reel can reach far more people than Shakespeare could. This allows for far more reach both nationally and internationally, subsequently words and phrases could become popularised much easily and so could the alterations of their meanings.

Interestingly, the slang terms used by the newer generations have revived old English conventions even though they had long since been abolished. In English, no word has started with the letters "fn" since the 1400s, yet due to the widely popular video game Five Nights at Freddy's, this convention has been refuted due to the acronym being FNAF. The acronym used is always pronounced as a regular word and not each letter separately, proving the language is much more flexible and maleable in this day and age. Conventions have also been introduced to common everyday words, such as can. In old English, can was treated as an infinitive verbal and thus an individual could say the words “to can” in proper english. But can was then turned to a defective verb and it remained unchallenged. Until generation z. The generation bought back this convention by popularised the phrase “i just can't even” treating the word can as an infinite verb. While these ideas have not been recognised in formalised english, it does pave the idea for future changes to be made to english to revive these conventions.And it's  all due to slang. 

Ultimately, no generation has altered the English language as quickly as Gen Z has. The words coined by this generation such as rizz have been officially recognised by dictionary.com. While these words do remain slang today, it raises many questions of what the formal English language may look like further into a future with even more media reach and possibly different norms.