Do You Speak Brain Rot?: Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s New, Nonsensical Language

“The competitions are a few times a week at lunch,” Austin Stone, 15, explained, “I always come in second. My friend Edward, he knows like thirty of them, he comes in first.’’

The friendly competitions Stone described tested his friend group’s knowledge of Italian brain rot characters. 

“Brain rot”, Oxford University Press’s 2024 word of the year, is defined as “the cause and effect of…low-quality, low-value content found on social media and the internet.”

Similar to other brain rot terms, the Italian characters that Stone referred to are the nonsensical product of online discourse and childish humor; fan-favorite character Ballerina Cappuccina is depicted as a ballerina with a coffee cup for a head.

Brain rot words and trends have been dominating social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram for months. However, their popularity seems to be increasing with every scroll. 

Hashtags reveal the uptake in Gen Z, Gen Alpha lingo. “#sigma” has been tagged in over 5.5 million TikToks while “#skibidi” has been tagged in another 1.2 million. 

Online creators have even begun to build careers off these brain rot terms. A prime example: Adam Aleksic, also known as @etmpologynerd online.

Aleksic, a Harvard-educated linguist, spends five or more hours of his day filming short videos in which he breaks down the roots and uses of trending slang words. He has racked up an impressive 1.5 million followers on Instagram and 747.9 thousand on TikTok. 

He recently expanded his work offline in June. In his new, best-selling book “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language​​”, he continues dissecting the internet’s favorite words and phrases. 

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Aleksic stressed the eve

rgrowing significance of brain rot. “The more I looked into it, the more I realized that [internet] algorithms are really affecting every aspect of modern language change,” he said.

Aleksic’s comment agrees with studies performed by the Trinity College of London in 2024. The college concluded that 80% of Gen Z students acquire a greater portion of their language skills by watching social media. 

Now, teachers are attempting to welcome Gen Z lingo in their classrooms. 67% of teachers surveyed by the college said that they are trying to incorporate multicultural English slang into their lessons in order to accommodate the unconventional vocabulary that they encounter. 

Ann Arbor public high school teacher and mother to three middle schoolers Sara Badalamente expressed that she, and her coworkers, hope to foster connections with younger generations by speaking in brain rot. 

“I think that any way you can connect with other people, like younger people, is by using their type of language,” she continued, drawing a comparison to teaching translanguage, “I might try to use Spanish if I’m talking to a Spanish-speaking student to make that connection.”

Badalamente said that her use of Gen Z slang is normally successful in establishing connections with her students. “When I use the words aura or alpha, sigma, they’re like ‘Stop!’ and it makes them laugh, but they know that I’m trying to show that I understand what they’re saying and I can use the terminology in the right way.” 

“Their generation uses certain words, and my generation might use different ones,” she noted, discussing that some brain-rot words sound unnatural coming out of her mouth.

Stone also observed that older generations using brain rot lingo can be awkward, “My uncle, he’s in his 30s or 40s, and because he’s older, when he tries to say it, it’s really awkward, but it’s also really funny.”

Stone views brain rot as a language personal to Gen Z and Gen Alpha. “It's like our own personal way of joking around and making fun of each other,” he said, “It’s our own language that our parents don’t know, so it’s special to us.”

He explained that “speaking in brain rot” often allows him and his friends to discuss topics that they want to keep secret from their parents. When they talk about “making a move” on a girl they find attractive, they can just say that they have “rizz” and avoid their parents’ nosy questions. 

For this reason, Columbia University child psychology student Henna Samtani said, “I think definitely having stricter parents could encourage them to use this more…they’re creating this language for themselves so that no one else needs to hear.”

“They’re just stupid words that sound funny and don’t make any sense, but we all understand it,” said Stone.