Slang Culture in the Age of Social Media

Image: Adobe Stock

People often worry that language is “getting worse”: the rise of internet slang is collapsing the world’s collective attention span and resulting in a new digital dialect that is virtually unintelligible. Scroll through TikTok or Instagram and you’ll come across a stream of online slang in posts by young people that can feel random or out of context; phrases like “brain rot,” “sigma,” “skibidi” and “rizz.” To many, this can feel like linguistic decline. 

This fear of language regression isn’t new. Prescriptivists have always sought to control the natural evolution of language out of concern over perceived decline, with efforts to standardize and stabilize the English language evident from at least 17^th-century Britain. This time around, the digital medium of modern language change is moving so fast that many of us simply cannot keep up. But calling this change linguistic regression or decline is misleading: language isn’t deteriorating, it’s adapting. What feels strange and perhaps unsettling is not the existence of slang itself, but the technological environment that it now inhabits. The question isn’t whether slang is worse than before, it’s whether technology is changing not just how language spreads, but what slang is today. 

Slang Culture Then and Now

Language evolution is both inevitable and essential for human communication. We need language to adapt with us as we experience technological, cultural and social change over time. While language change is, ironically, the only constant feature of language, the setting that it now inhabits is something entirely new. Slang plays an important role in language evolution, functioning as a tool for identity-building, boundary-making, rebellion, self-expression and group membership. Different social groups form their own codes that signal belonging, and these trends are often driven by younger generations who carry their linguistic innovations with them into adulthood. We see this in words that we use every day like “cool,” “OK” and “hangout,” which were all once slang before becoming ordinary features of our language. 

The function of slang today remains the same. Teenagers, musicians, and other subcultures continue to redefine language, coming up with new inside-jokes and obscure meanings that only those in their groups understand. This is what slang has always been—local and embedded in oral culture. It spread by voice and proximity—if you weren’t there, you missed it. Now, slang is global and permanent, recorded online forever. A phrase coined in a small online community can reach millions within a few hours: terms like “main character energy,” “NPC,” “unc” (meaning uncle) and “delulu” (short for delusional) don’t just circulate gradually, they accelerate through algorithms, explode into popular slang culture, and then vanish almost as suddenly as they arrive. 

This shift has revolutionized the role that slang plays in culture. Screenshots, reposts and saves mean that slang is now eternally archived—if you weren’t there, just look it up. This speed means that trends appear and die within weeks, and the meaning of a word or phrase can mutate beyond recognition in the space of a few shares. The exclusivity that slang once offered a subculture evaporates the moment it goes mainstream which, now, can happen overnight. 

This has resulted in a kind of linguistic unpredictability, where slang not only spreads faster, but is also replaced faster. It’s certainly less tangible than it used to be, but to see it simply as a decline ignores the intense, high-speed environment in which slang now operates. The structural shift in communication has forced slang culture to adapt, to become faster and more layered, while still working as a key marker of identity. What was once a slow cultural drift has now become a high-speed cycle—in reality, we are just being exposed to much more language at a faster rate than ever before. 

Algorithms Don’t Just Spread Slang, They Shape It

For many centuries, language evolution was influenced and guided by academic institutions like schools, universities and dictionary publishers who defined what “proper” English was meant to look and sound like. Over time, the authority of these establishments has been replaced by the internet. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X and Snapchat now hold major sway over which words and phrases circulate online, and which ones disappear. Algorithms are now acting as language editors, highlighting what should be seen and shared, causing concern that language is not evolving “naturally” anymore, but instead being processed and filtered through a system that is designed to prioritize speed and reward attention. 

Online platforms filter and compress language through tools such as character limits, captions, comments, abbreviations and emojis, with GIFs and memes acting as contextual cues that magnify tone, irony and emotion. Algorithms also pick and choose what gets spread, favoring the slang that is primed for maximum reach. Communication is molded around what gets the most views, not necessarily what is meaningful. In this case, the deeper linguistic shift is not speed, but structure. Social media platforms don’t passively carry language from one device to the next; they actively filter, rank, and amplify it. 

This has led to the rise of what some researchers and writers call “algospeak”—a term popularized by Adam Aleksic in his book of the same name, which explores how users adapt language to platform rules. On TikTok, for instance, users avoid moderation filters by saying “unalive” instead of “kill,” “seggs” instead of “sex,” or “corn” instead of “porn.” This is a striking development in language evolution, signposting that slang is no longer just socially motivated, it’s increasingly shaped by the technologies and machines that govern it. 

How is Slang Changing?

If algorithms influence which words persist, they may also influence what kinds of words are created in the first place. Slang today often prioritizes:

• Speed and brevity: “idk” (I don’t know), “lmk” (let me know), “smh” (shake my head) and “iykyk” (if you know, you know). 
• Visual or meme-based meaning: the skull emoji to signal laughter or disbelief.
• Describing an aesthetic or vibe: “it’s giving…” This slang expression however is often now made fun of online, demonstrating how a recently coined slang term can morph and lose its original meaning or value.

In many cases, meaning is no longer carried by words alone, but by context, format, and performance. A meme or shared online reference can communicate more than vocabulary itself. This raises a difficult question: is this a loss of linguistic richness, or simply a different kind of richness?

We could argue that this environment produces language that is more disposable, less precise, and increasingly shaped by attention economies rather than human need. If slang is constantly recycled for virality, does it lose its function as a genuine marker of identity? Yet digital slang can also be remarkably creative. For the first time in history it blends text, image, sound, and timing into layered forms of meaning. A single phrase like “that’s so me coded” or “I’m just a girl” can carry irony, humor, and cultural reference all in one. Rather than becoming simpler, language is arguably becoming more multidimensional—though it is more dependent on shared digital context for interpretation. 

AI and the Future of Slang

There is also a new danger to look out for: artificial intelligence. AI tools have been created to “optimize” language and have the power and reach to steer language away from a space of experimental, creative expression and towards a more generic, global standard that everyone can access and understand. This could create a paradox in our digital culture where slang is extremely chaotic and extremely standardized at the same time, as new words and phrases are churned out of the internet at a rapid pace while any linguistic anomalies are smoothed out to ensure user-friendliness. 

By involving machines and AI in the generation and filtering of slang, this type of language is increasingly less authentic. The fact that human language is now not always “human-made” through social interaction but instead shaped by technology raises questions about our ability to think for ourselves and forge our own linguistic path.

So, maybe what we should be worrying about is not that language is “getting worse” but that language is evolving alongside and within a technological environment that is increasingly driving what was once a purely human process. Whether this constitutes deterioration, or simply a transformation of what language was always doing, remains to be seen. No generation has ever seen language develop in this way or at this speed, so as we witness a new feature of language change emerge, it can feel unsettling. But unfamiliarity has always been foundational to genuine linguistic growth and transformation, and language has never existed in isolation from the mechanisms that spread it throughout the world. When we look back at the history of the English language, we can see the many different tools that have had a global impact on the way we communicate; from the invention of the printing press to the television and the mobile phone, language has been shaped by technological innovations for millennia. Despite these shifts, we can still decide what it means to speak, create and understand—the future of slang comes down to how we, as humans, define connection, authorship and thought itself.

---

Hannah Mulcahy is a masters degree student in international development at the University of Sheffield in the UK. She holds an undergraduate degree in linguistics and modern languages, specializing in sociolinguistics, including language policy and language attitudes and perceptions, also from the University of Sheffield.