Breaking Down Gen Z Slang and Language

[00:00:06] This is #GenZ, a podcast that explores Generation Z, who they are, how they're different from other generations, while also being an incredible blend of those who came before them. We explore what they think is cool, what moves them, and why they do what they do. I'm your host, Meghan Grace. Language is always changing. It may feel like Gen Z is experiencing that evolution faster and more visibly than generations before them.

[00:00:32] Social media has expanded our social circles far beyond the communities that we grew up in, allowing slang, speech patterns, and cultural references to travel almost instantly. And now, AI is adding another layer. Recent research suggests that large language models aren't just changing how we write, but they may also be changing to make our writing more similar, reducing some of the linguistic variation that traditionally reflects our identities and communities.

[00:01:01] While it can feel like Gen Z invented an entirely new language, riz, chopped, and whatever 6-7 is supposed to mean, I'm still confused about that one, language has always evolved this way. Words are borrowed, shortened, repurposed, and given new meaning, while even our accents and ideas about what sounds polite or professional can shift from one generation to the next.

[00:01:22] Vocabulary is often one of the most noticeable parts of generational language change, but some of the deeper changes are happening in the way we sound, communicate, and signal identity. So what can the way that Gen Z is speaking tell us about culture that they're creating? And what happens when language in our communities aren't just from the people around us, but about the people, the algorithms, and the AI that we're interacting with online.

[00:01:47] To help us unpack all of that, I'm joined by Dr. Valerie Friedland, professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno, and an expert in sociolinguistics, American dialects, and regional language variation. She's the author of Like Literally Dude and Why We Talk Funny. Her work explores the science and history behind the speech habits, accents, and language changes we experience every day.

[00:02:12] In this episode, Valerie and I talk about why every generation seems to reinvent new language, how social media is reshaping slang and regional accents, what AI could mean for the future of the way we communicate, and why Gen Z's more casual approach to language may actually be revealing something deeper about what this generation values. So let's get into it.

[00:02:38] Well, we are back for another great conversation with a wonderful guest. I'm very excited to be able to introduce you all to a new friend. And we're going to be talking about something that, as what I consider a certified yapper myself, I'm very excited to be talking about someone who actually studies linguistics and language. And I've always felt that language is such an important thing that we have to keep an eye on because, one, it's fun, but, two, it's a piece of culture.

[00:03:04] And so we really need to bring in an expert to help us understand that, that each generation and each group has their own way of doing that, and nobody better than my friends and the faculty. So welcome, Valerie. So excited to have you here. Thank you, Megan. I'm thrilled to be here. It's going to be a fun conversation. I think so. I think anyone that studies language, it's going to be a good conversation, I think. You can tell me. Before we get into some of the hard-hitting questions around Gen Z, I'm always interested in people's journeys. And my listeners know that I'm a bit of a higher ed nerd. I'm a friend of the faculty.

[00:03:34] I love to know how people got into the work that they're doing and a bit of their journey. So I'm not going to say walk us through your whole resume, but give us a little bit of how you got into this seat and the professional work that you're doing today. Sure. Yeah. So I'm a linguist. I'm a professor of sociolinguistics, which sort of studies how language and social life interact or how who we are in the real world affects the way that we talk and interact verbally.

[00:04:01] And, you know, I'd love to say that I was five and I was like, oh, I'm going to be a linguist. But I had no idea what linguistics was. It's just my background, I think, set me up for an interest in questions about language because I grew up in the South. So I think you're in Tennessee. I actually grew up in Tennessee, which, you know, has a lot of accent angst or it did. You know, I'm a little older. And there was at that time, particularly this sort of Southern ideology about the accent.

[00:04:27] So that played a role just in awareness of how other people characterize the South and how we spoke. But also my parents were actually immigrants. They were French speaking. And that was very unique at the time in the town I grew up in. And they all stood out. People commented on it all the time, not negatively, but just like, oh, where are you from? And I love your accent. Just noticing the accent.

[00:04:52] So I think I didn't realize it at the time, but just this intense focus on language and accent and identity, sort of these pieces of my youth culture, right, that came into play, set me up to be really interested in those questions around how is language part of who we are and how we express ourselves in ways that we don't realize. I didn't realize this until I was in college and I had to take a linguistics course. It was required as part of my major.

[00:05:22] And I sat in a class called sociolinguistics or language and society. I think it was its name. And, you know, it was one of those things you sign up for. You're there because you have to be and you're thinking, oh, my God. How much work is this going to be? And then I get in there and it was just it was so ridiculously informative and just like eye opening, rocking my world in terms of language is completely different than I thought it was. It's not just this thing that we sort of, you know, say and do without reflexive thinking.

[00:05:52] It's actually incredibly patterned, absolutely governed by how our social life revolves around each other, incredibly historically driven in terms of what the things we say reflect in terms of how we've evolved as humans, how we've evolved as groups, how we've evolved as people in relationships.

[00:06:15] I also think it helped me a lot understand the differences in the way that my boyfriend at the time and I interacted and spoke because, of course, you know, you're often like, God, what is it? Why doesn't he get that? And all of a sudden we did a lot of language and gender stuff. And I was like, oh, that's why. That's why. Right. He hasn't learned the same rules as I have. So I think that really just propelled me to learn more about the field. And then, you know, when I graduated, it was one of those years that didn't have a lot of jobs, as I think a lot of people these days are feeling.

[00:06:44] And grad school seemed like an obvious choice. And I literally just picked it, you know, like, oh, let's go do linguistics because that was interesting. I mean, it was as random as that. It worked out for me because I ended up loving it. I got to study the things that fascinate me. I mean, where else do you get to say, oh, I'm really curious about that. Let me spend the next five years exploring it. And at that time, I was really curious about Southern speech because people outside the South still thought all Southerners sounded like the Clampetts. Yes.

[00:07:13] But they don't. I mean, I don't sound like I'm from the South. A lot of people would not hear me sound like Southerner. I would have never picked that up from the get-go. Yeah. And I'm part of a generation. We'll probably talk a little bit about this. But the first generation for home regional accents are kind of fading. And, you know, it was just something that I was really interested in proving. Like, why don't we sound like people think we do?

[00:07:36] And can I express this in a way that's scientific enough by studying it that people will start to believe me because people outside the South always thought I was anomalous? And I'm like, no, none of my friends sound very Southern. I was from an urban area in the South. And so, you know, I just followed that route of interest. And it's worked out pretty well for me. I love my job. I've gotten to really go a lot of places, talk to a lot of really fun people, and explore a lot of cool topics.

[00:08:02] I mean, I can tell right now that we could have like an hour and a half conversation, and we might have to do that offline. Because there's like, I truly joke, I'm like, my hobby is trying to pick apart other people's accents in the South. And be like, you from Mississippi, specifically around the Delta? And they're like, how did you know? I was like, I was just listening with my ears. Like, I love to be like, that's, you're from Lowcountry, aren't you? And people are like, how do you know that? Like, the whole thing with White Lotus, when Parker Posey's accent, people were obsessed with it.

[00:08:29] And they were like, she's originally from Mississippi, so she would have been able to do an accent. I was like, no, but she's specifically doing the North Carolinian suburban mom accent. It's different. Right, the coastal South. If you know those people. It's so different. And people, it's amazing to me for people that don't, aren't in the South and hear it. Because I feel like sometimes we're right on top of each other. So you can hear it and you get that. Where I live, I feel like I live in the New York City of the South. So it's like you get all the accents in Nashville.

[00:08:59] And so I hear it. I'm like, oh, we could talk about this forever. But I just love that you found your thing. That you're like, this is fascinating. I'm going to continue to study it. And you also get to do a very fun job. I love when people find nerdy jobs and then they become really fun. Like, which is, you kind of found it. You found it. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's really funny because I think when I started in this field, if I said I was in linguistics, it was totally the dork job, right? But now it's very trendy. It's a cool job to have.

[00:09:29] And I'm amazed that people pay me to do this fabulous thing I do. I get to study how people interact and speak. And it's just, it's an amazing job. I'm really, really lucky. Although I will say academics is a different world than when I was in it. And I'm not sure it's as easy a gig as it, never it was easy, but as easy a gig to get into today. I think academics and universities are in a different realm of the world now than they were

[00:09:57] in terms of what they're providing, the pressure on them, the kind of financing they have. So I'm not sure I could do what I did now and just following something that interested me and being lucky enough to have people pay me for it. But I'm really, really happy that I managed to swing it. Yeah, yes, we are. I think we're also living in a world where you can be a professional nerd. You can be a nerd about your thing. And I love that because I'm also a professional nerd about things. And so we're just in good company today.

[00:10:25] Let's start to pivot and think about the way that generations, right? So my work is where we think about how generations develop this culture and the things that they value, the things that they do, their norms, their etiquette, all of that. And I think I've, especially in the last year, I feel like I've heard a lot more about this. Not maybe the last year, but it feels very present. And I will throw out there, it's millennials are feeling like the disconnect with the Gen Alpha they're raising. But I think that there's the Gen Z of it all.

[00:10:54] Like Gen Z is playing a translator between the two. So like when the Gen Alpha are like 6, 7, we're like, what does that mean? What does the skibbity toilet mean? And Gen Z is like, okay, let me try to translate that for you. And this is, that's really the inspiration of where this conversation came to be is that I think millennials used to be on the, we used to be on the cusp of like knowing what the cool stuff was. And then about two years ago, we stopped being able to know what the cool stuff was.

[00:11:22] And so my question first is, do we, how much do we think that new language or new slang, whatever we want to call it, is actually new? Or are younger generations just inventing or reinventing language? Right. Well, a great question. And first, you know, every generation goes through that where they age out of being cool. And then all of a sudden, it usually takes them a few years to realize, oh, wait, we're not the cool people anymore.

[00:11:49] And then it's when they have children and they're like, oh, my gosh, I don't get these kids. I have no idea what they're saying. And what's lovely for me is that I always get new students to interpret the next generation for me. So kind of like you're saying with Gen Z. I'd say I think we need to think about it a little differently. You know, a lot of times people are interested in what's new and what's recycled. But with language, things are almost always reinventions, but that doesn't make them any less innovative.

[00:12:19] So every generation is incredibly innovative. I mean, language is incredibly variable over time and speakers. It has always been that way or else we'd sound like we were reading Beowulf all the time. And, you know, none of us do that. We can't even understand Beowulf. If you've ever been forced to look at it, it makes no sense. It's a completely different language. And that's about a thousand years different. The language has gone from a completely separate language, which we call the English, but you can't read, to the modern English we speak today.

[00:12:49] So that tells you that language is always changing. So, you know, how do you go from what looks like a completely new language when you compare it to old English? Incremental steps. And those incremental steps are usually not just inventions out of nowhere. They're extensions of meaning, extensions of use, extensions of processes that bring slowly newer and newer forms to light.

[00:13:16] So it's rare that you get through just complete invention where I'm just going to, like, pull something out of the blue, out of the air and say, oh, here's a new word, and just make something up. More often what we do is repurpose words by extending their meaning. I think a great example of this is like use, which is, of course, very prevalent with Gen Z and millennials, where you see it from a perspective of using it.

[00:13:42] I think a lot of people say meaninglessly or vacuously, which is BS. From a linguistic standpoint, it's absolutely meaningful. It's just meaningful in a different way than historically it has been. But like started as a verb in English. In Old English, there was a verb, lykion, that meant similar to or resembling. And then we ended up with a preposition like in about the 1400s, so about 400 or 500 years later.

[00:14:11] And then a conjunction like, which was even 100 years after that. And now we have a discourse marker like that actually developed in about the 1700s. So that like that we put at the beginning of our sentences, like, I don't know what he's thinking. Like, I don't like it. That like is actually 300 years old, which we don't realize. And now we're getting the new form is the quotative like. So I was like, I'm not doing that. He was like, yes, you are. Words instead of the verb to say.

[00:14:39] So those are all innovative, right? They're incredibly new uses that start from one form, but they're not completely out of nowhere, right? So they develop from this original like that meant to resemble or be similar to. And actually what all those like express is a subjective sensibility or resemblance. So when you say he was like, I'm not doing that, what you're saying is he said something similar to.

[00:15:09] And what it's doing is it's sort of extending that original meaning of like. So it's incredibly inventive, but it's not 100% new, if that makes sense. We think of even just slang words. So like is a little different because that's a discourse marker. But just thinking of new slang, a lot of what we hear as slang today are kind of repurposed words, like Riz, of course, right, is a great example where it's a shortening of charisma. But it's not just a shortening.

[00:15:38] It's actually a new use. So it's used with a different sense of what charisma is. I mean, someone might have Riz, but they wouldn't want to have charisma in the old sense, right? Charisma sort of meant like you were influential and you've made people want to listen to you. But Riz in the way that young people use it or Gen Z uses it is more like, I got Riz. You know, where it's like, I got this unspoken appeal and you may not realize it because I seem like a dork, but I'm not. Totally different than charisma.

[00:16:07] So again, very inventive. But then something like 6-7, yes, it uses two words that preexisted, but it's 100% not related to the meaning of those words. So that's incredibly innovative. And then skibbity toilet would be another example. Again, what does skibbity even mean? But toilet is certainly an existing word. So it's a combination. Or how about chuzz, right? Which is not just... Don't know that one.

[00:16:35] Chuzz is like, I think, well, my students tell me it's like chopped hoe or chopped hus. Chopped hus. Like a chopped hus. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. So it's like a chopped hus, you know, and so chuzz. And that's actually a blend. So that's where something like the word smog is a blend. The word motel is actually a blend of hotel and motor inn.

[00:17:02] Vlog is a blend of video blog, right? So it's actually innovative in two different ways. It's sort of a new word, but it's also a blend. And so I guess what I'm saying is there's no such thing as something that's strictly invented because it's always drawing from something before, but that makes it no less innovative. I will say, though, there is one area of language that is completely innovative generally that people don't think about because vocabulary is an easy thing to talk about.

[00:17:31] But the difference in generations is much deeper. And there are many more important differences across generations than vocabulary. In fact, vocabulary is fleeting. But so things like sound changes are almost always innovative, right? A sound change means it's different than what went before. So one big change is that sweeping the country, especially in younger generations, across different regions is something called the low back vowel merger,

[00:18:01] where words like that I'm going to spell it so I don't influence the way you say it. And I want to see what you say. So I'm going to spell two words and I want to see what you say for them. This is a fun game. I'm the girl for this game. Okay, perfect. Okay, so everybody listening should also see how they say these. Okay, so one is... I feel like I'm back in class with Dr. Valerie. Yeah, exactly. C-O-T. And then the other word is C-A-U-G-H-T.

[00:18:27] C-A-U-G-H-T. So cotton cot. Okay, so do you hear a difference in the way you say those? Say those again. Cotton cot. Yeah, so do you think you say it differently? I don't know if I hear a different... I don't know if I do. You would... You do. So yes, well, I just want your own self-reflective thinking. I don't think I say it differently. Okay, now let me give you two more just so we can sort of also check, depending on an environment.

[00:18:57] So I'm going to give you a word, C-A-L-L-E-R, like to, you know, on the phone. And then C-O-L-L-A-R, like what you put around a dog's neck. Oh, okay. Collar and collar. Right. And how did that feel? I think there's more difference there. It feels... I think it feels different there. I don't know if I'm hearing it differently, but I see it feels different. I'm laughing because it sounded exactly the same. Okay. You're a collar, collar.

[00:19:26] So you have what is called the low back vowel merger. Historically, those are separate vowels. Now, when you said the first two, I would say that there was a slight, which is not unusual for a Southern background person, but very slight off glide in the way you said the C-A-U-G-H-T one, but it's almost negligible. And I would hazard a guess that in normal conversational speech, where you're not paying as much attention, you may not even have that.

[00:19:53] But sometimes when I set someone up to say them back-to-back like that, they try to... Like, they are focused on making them slightly different, so they overthink it, which I think might have been the case there. But generally speaking, I would call you a merger. So historically speaking, those are not the same vowel classes. So it'd be more like caught and cut or caught and caught, depending on where you were from.

[00:20:19] Now, in the South, it would have more of an off-glide where it'd be like caught and caught, you know, caught. No, that's actually more Northern. Caught, caught. That would be more, right? That's the one. And I caught myself last night. I was... I had friends over and we were having tea, and I had to stop myself from the Southern boil. Like, I was like, put the kettle on to boil. And I was like, boil! Like, but I have, since I was a kid, not kid, kid, but like in college, learned how to like accent regulate.

[00:20:49] And even I was in the South in my own home, and I was like, put the kettle on to boil. Like, I had... Because I said, the first one was like, can you stick the kettle on to boil? And I was like, you... What is that? What happened out of your mouth? Where'd it come from? Correct. And sometimes it does sneak up on me. Right. That historically would be different. Southerners in the generation, you know, the baby boomers, would have said those differently. So if you have like grandparents or parents that are Southern,

[00:21:18] they, and you ask them that same test, those are probably different to them. But for almost everybody under the age of 40, I would say those have coalesced. And it doesn't matter what region you're from. So that's novel, right? Because you're taking things that used to be separate and merging them. So this is innovation, right? Nobody did this before. Now, that doesn't mean it hasn't happened in other places before. We do see like New England is a place where we do find that historically,

[00:21:47] but it is an innovation. And so people don't think of those types of features when they're thinking of speech across the generation. But those are actually the most important differences and the most innovative. Well, and that's like my next question is we're all spending so much more time online. So I think we're hearing people outside of our immediate sphere of how we talk. And with our, we know younger generations are online more, engaging with people that they wouldn't normally in their community, for good, for bad, whatever you want to call it.

[00:22:17] But what is happening to our regional accents? Okay, well, I think that's a really complex question. So I'm going to unpack it a little bit because yes and no. Yes and no. So our younger generations in urban areas,

[00:22:43] particularly in areas that historically have had really noticeable accents, right? Because everybody has an accent, but certain ones tend to get called out more in media, in our ideology of language that we talk about, like, oh, those Southerners and those Southern accents, right? Those types of things. In urban areas like Raleigh, North Carolina, Nashville, Memphis, where I grew up, those accents are fading among younger generations.

[00:23:09] So we see less of those sort of traditional classic accent features, like the pin and pen merger in the South, which, right, has been around since about the Civil War, which is not historically what the Southern accent sounded like in, you know, 1700. But in 1900, most Southerners did have that merger where they said words like pin and pen, P-I-N and P-E-N, the same way.

[00:23:37] Young speakers in urban areas themselves don't do that anymore. And actually, when you talked about Parker Posey and White Lotus, it was really interesting. He and her husband, although her husband's accent was not as good as the Featherner, you know, he didn't, I think he's not even, I can't remember the actor did. I don't think he's American. So it was a less good job. He's British, yeah. Yeah. But their children on this show didn't have a Southern accent. So there was no effort. That's actually very realistic for urban speakers. I think if you're from the Raleigh area,

[00:24:05] you don't hear a lot of Southern accents there anymore. So yes, that's true. That doesn't mean that new accents are rising up, right? Those traditional classic urban or regional accents might be declining, but there are certainly accents still at work. For one, rural versus urban accents are becoming much more salient. And there is still a Southern accent, but where you find it has differed.

[00:24:29] Like in the more rural areas of the South, you find really strong Southern accents. You also find it by politics. So among conservative right-leaning speakers, particularly in the South, we have a number of studies that have suggested they have more aspects of Southern vowels than people that lean Democratic or left-leaning on issues. In other areas, like even California, when you get to rural areas of California,

[00:24:58] they have found Southern-like speech features there. So I think what we're seeing is sort of a reinvention of accents, which is what we see all the time in terms of new ones coming up that symbolize the divides that are relevant to us at those moments in time culturally, while old ones that reflect sort of older divides are fading away. And it's absolutely true that social media has impacted us in terms of who we're talking to,

[00:25:25] especially younger generations, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, or the digital generation, right? So most of their social networks are far beyond their local communities. That is novel, right? Even the millennial generation and before that, most of their interactions were with people that they grew up with, that they hung out with in their neighborhoods, that they went to school with. That is not the case anymore. While you still might have those social networks, you also have these really extensive social networks

[00:25:53] where you're in contact in a very engaged and interactive way with people that don't live by you and don't sound like you and maybe don't look like you. So that has certainly impacted speech. But I would say, I would argue that that impacts speech in terms of spreading things like slang and vocabulary more than it does in accents. What we see with the breakdown of regional accents goes further back than that. It actually starts with Generation X.

[00:26:20] And that is from economic and migratory and social changes that really started after World War II. So the parents of Generation X did certain things after World War II, like they moved to suburbs. They were also very concerned, you know, with... There was a lot more racial hostility at that time. So there was a lot less integration with people of different races or ethnicities at the time. Also more hostility.

[00:26:48] So we found their speech often became more regional sounding, more local sounding across sort of racial divides because of those dynamics socially. But with their children, things started to change. So a lot of companies moved out of the Rust Belt, which had had really local hiring practices and reinforced local social networks. As those broke down, those local networks and internal hiring practices broke down.

[00:27:16] There was a rise of industry in the South and the Sun Belt. So people were moving and now bringing new accents into places that had different ones. And people were leaving to go get jobs, which really the migration was changing. But also a breakdown of racial hostility. So racial relations became a little better. And urban areas began to be repopulated with more integration, bringing more diversity and more awareness of other features.

[00:27:42] And bringing, for example, African-American English into a lot of white speech, right? Young white adolescent speech, especially male, because of what they thought it symbolized, which was coolness and toughness, which is also just a stereotype. It's not really what African-American English stands for. But again, so all of those things eroded these attractions to very, very local features, which had traditionally after World War II been in place. So that really started the ball rolling.

[00:28:09] Then you put digital content and digital interaction on top of that. And that just escalated the speed at which this was happening. And that made it seem like everybody sounded the same because it also gave access to both communities that people didn't have access to before. So African-American English features really spread out because now it was much more visible. Kids that wouldn't have had access to those communities before could now access them online, even as observers rather than participants.

[00:28:39] And that would spread slang and also just language from that community outward, which is why we see so much vocabulary from that culture in young white adolescent speech as well. But it also put people in touch in ways and say we're interacting outside of the local communities, which also erodes the attraction to local features. Yeah, yeah. That's it's I'm I have so many thoughts to it. And I think as one, I love someone that understands how generations, especially in America,

[00:29:09] people think like what's happening today to youth just came out of nowhere. And we're like, no, it goes back so many decades and so many generations of how people got to where they are and how much it's intertwined with the social and the economic pieces of everything really that happened around it after World War II. But I do think that it's some of the again, the culture that's developed by generations as they are young people have multiple decades and multiple generations that are building into it.

[00:29:39] So what we're seeing with Gen Z and the way that they're developing their own language and their own patterns of speech and their own vocabulary and the way that they're speaking and connecting with one another. I'm not saying it didn't happen by accident, but it didn't happen overnight. Right. There's a lot of evolution, which you just pointed out, of how that has changed. And I think we're at an interesting point in time where we've we've got I feel like we've made so much technological change. Right. Even in the last five years and with AI kind of like permeating into our life.

[00:30:08] My question is, how is AI, especially the chatbot kind of mindset that a lot of people are using it with, influencing an evolving language? Is it changing the way we're writing and speaking actually more than we think it is? I don't know if you have an answer to this or if you're seeing anything we should be paying attention to, because I know that we that we are seeing Gen Z, especially finding that chat GPT is like their second their second brain.

[00:30:35] I have to just guess that they're probably evolving a little bit of their language along the way. Absolutely. I mean, I think you have to look at it in a couple of different ways. First of all, we don't know for sure in terms of what will be the long term consequences on language with this, because it is relatively new and evolving. And I think as we get more into interacting verbally, it will be different than the way we currently really interact with artificial intelligence now or Gen AI,

[00:31:03] where it's mainly through writing a lot of times or through algorithms that shows us certain things versus others. So has it affected our writing? A hundred percent. There's a lot of evidence that it has, right? That it bleeds into not only does our reliance on it for writing make our writing sound more similar, right? It's a little homogenizing in that sense, because it draws from the same data, training data, and it creates things in similar patterns and uses a lot of words that it lands on.

[00:31:32] A lot of those AI detectors are actually looking for certain word usage patterns, because it's not what human created stuff typically does. So that has definitely had an influence. And there's been a number of studies looking at writing like academic writing, for example, which is different than Gen Z writing, but I think it tells us the same sorts of things. And they've seen that even in human-generated academic writing, the influx of AI-generated writing has influenced the choice of words and the structure and the style of writing.

[00:32:01] So absolutely, writing has been influenced, for better or for worse. I mean, there are, I think, two sides to that coin that you could argue. In terms of how we talk, it's also a yes and no, in the sense that the way that we pick up the style of speech that we use is generally through interactions with social models that are in our real daily lives that matter to us and mean something. That is usually our peer group.

[00:32:29] It starts with our parents, but then we don't tend to sound like our parents. We sound like the people we hang out with. And that still has to be real engagement. There is very little evidence that talking, spending a lot of time online with ChatGPT is that formative to your accent. Part of that is when you are forming that accent, it starts at four or five. And you're generally not interacting with ChatGPT at that stage, right? When we start to see young people, hopefully. And I think there's more controls being put in on it.

[00:32:57] There was a period of, oh my God, there's this new technology. We don't know exactly how to control it. Schools are regulating its use more. There's just not going to be that kind of hands-on interaction in that four to 10-year-old range where our initial accents are getting formed. Our initial dialects are getting formed. And so that still relies on who you're hanging out with, who's cool on the playground, what our goals are for life.

[00:33:24] So we find that children that are integrated into their local communities in ways that suggest they will stay there. A lot of times, it depends on class, right? Working class kids are more engaged with their local communities because that's probably where their post-school opportunities will lie and their friendships and their networks. Whereas children that are sort of middle class and outward modeling, so they want to go to college or leave their communities,

[00:33:48] they tend to have less local features because what they're attracted to are different kind of external models. Those are still not driven by ChatGPT or Claude or any of those. They're driven by the people that you admire, who you interact with, what you want out of life. That hasn't changed, and I don't think it will. Where I do see the influence is on the things we talk about and how we talk about them and the ideas we have about them.

[00:34:16] Because where I think Claude and ChatGPT and all those models influence us the most, and also just the algorithmic AI that drive what we see on our feeds, is they are homogenizing us to the same ideas, the same topics, the same ways of thinking that sort of reiterate the way that we already think, rather than letting us have this diversity. And part of this is just look at how you do searches now.

[00:34:42] If you go to Google, unless you turn it off, you ask it a question, it gives you an answer. Well, it's giving you an answer that it thinks is the best answer. But if you just went through and scrolled down the list, you would find 10 different perspectives on that, that question that you asked. You're not getting access to that anymore. So what you're getting told is what ChatGPT thinks you should know, or how it algorithmically determines what's important in those searches.

[00:35:10] So if we're all saying that, it's going to affect the way we talk about things, what we talk about, and the style of speech we use to talk about it. And because we're going to reiterate these words that we're saying over and over. This can be trendy topics. This can be slang. But anything that gets a lot of engagement on a social media platform, which could be things that are haters and lovers, right? I mean, a lot of times what you see being propelled by algorithms are not things that everybody agrees with. It's things that people are like, no, that's not the way it is, right? It's just a lot of infighting.

[00:35:39] Well, those topics might not have been visible prior to those algorithms telling us, this is a cool word that people are talking about. So then it's telling us what to think and say. And so that's its biggest influence, I think, on the way we'll talk. Whether or not it will actually affect our speech, I think, is going to be determined by how much we interact with verbal ChatGPT and Claude in the future. I mean, a lot of what we're hearing.

[00:36:06] So think about that new AI DJ on Spotify. I don't know if you've heard about that. DJX. But that's modeled on an actual person, and it's his actual voice. What he says is generated by AI. So what we're doing there is we're modeling most things still on what real people say and do. And so then it's real people that will actually be influencing us. But there's a great example of what it's doing is pigeonholing a certain kind of persona

[00:36:36] as what's appropriate for a DJ voice, right? So it's not surprising they picked an African-American kind of cool guy for DJ voice. But what that sort of is also telling in a way of how we limit our concepts of who should fit certain roles because of the culture that they represent. Same reason why most Siri voices, when they're auto-generated, come out as white female voices,

[00:37:02] because the voice of service, voice of secretaries, has almost always been a white female voice in terms of how we personify it. And so again, that influences us in terms of how we're thinking and talking and what we expect someone who's in an administrative role to sound like or how we expect someone who does DJing to sound like. So I think what we don't realize is the very kind of subversive ways that it will influence us. It's maybe not. We're not going to have an AI accent, I don't think.

[00:37:32] But we will be influenced by AI in very subtle ways that are probably worse. Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny you bring up the voice of Siri. Like when I learned that you could change the voice of Siri to something else, I immediately changed mine to an Australian man and referred to Siri as Hot Siri. So it – and I did this for years, years, years, years, years until I got a new phone and then Hot Siri became an Irishman. Never once has my Siri been a woman.

[00:38:00] So when people were – and I don't know if that makes me just like such a deeply rooted feminist in my brain that I was like, I think I'm going to boss around this man. But that was so funny you bring that up of the algorithmic models and how that influences even just our choices and our biases is so interesting. But I think what's unique about this generation is the awareness of the algorithm. I think that this generation is very aware of the algorithm and they'll even be like,

[00:38:25] I need to go find other things because the algorithm is so responsive now to, oh, you watched this one video about puppies? Here's another video about puppies and another video about puppies that I've noticed with this generation that they are almost gaming their algorithm if they know they're getting too much of one thing or they're not seeing the thing that they used to like go engage with content to almost trick their algorithm back to seeing what they want to see versus what the algorithm is telling them they should see. That might be true.

[00:38:54] I think you're probably right that people are aware of it, but I think the problem is that we are just an age of curation in a way we've never been before. And so curation in any form, even if you're like out curating your curator is still being curated. If that makes sense, because what you're doing there is you're training the algorithm like on other things you like, but you're not seeing everything that's out there because you're not getting that in your feed. And that's really not a fault of the person.

[00:39:24] It's a fault of the design of the system. And I mean, there are good things about that, right? Does it make life easy? Do you often like, I love it when Netflix tells me what I'll like, because I don't have to think about it, right? There are some times where I'm like, oh yeah, I wouldn't have found that, right? It's great. There's an ease to it, but there's also a cost to it. And just that we're losing some freedom in sort of viewing all the options out there. So I do think I have heard a lot of my students talk about their awareness of it.

[00:39:54] A viewpoint that reaffirms their own viewpoint too. But what I have found in many cases is acknowledgement of that, but no real attempt to look beyond that, right? So you can know that it's happening and it's still really hard to stop it from happening and find ways around that. So, you know, what that end result will be, I just don't know yet. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:40:20] So we have had just so many great things to talk about in this episode and I got a few more questions for you. One being because I always try to make sure that our listeners can kind of take something away. I mean, I could sit in the theory of all of this with you for hours and hours and hours and happily do it. But I think sometimes our listeners are like, well, what can I take from this and go apply in my life? So if you had advice for potentially Gen Z listeners or people that are raising, mentoring, kind of have Gen Z in their life that are navigating kind of language and its values and the way

[00:40:48] that it plays a part in their culture, what are some of the things that you would recommend to people so that they can balance this in a way and not feel overwhelmed? Because sometimes I feel like there's pressure to feel like you got to be with it all the time. Right. And I think that's on both ends. I think we see that a lot of, you know, a lot of my students that are Gen Z, they feel a lot of pressure to conform to standards that are not their generations or just understand why what they're doing somehow doesn't fit those expectations.

[00:41:15] And then I also get asked a lot by people of different generations, particularly in professional settings, you know, how do we understand what Gen Z is saying, right? How do we make sense of this group? And, you know, one of the big complaints I hear from older professional organizations is the language of Gen Z. Like, why are they so casual? And I think you brought up something that's important for everybody to remember is that this is not just like we woke up overnight and all of a sudden people were casual.

[00:41:43] This is a long-term 20th century kind of development that, I mean, no one speaks like they're in the Victorian period. And thank goodness for that. It's really reflective of an equality that is increasing with every generation, which is a great thing. Gen Z is really the generation where this egalitarian spirit, this idea of true democracy,

[00:42:08] that we are all equals and that rank and stature is not so important anymore, has come to be expressed fully in the way that they style themselves and the way that they talk. I think that can be daunting, especially if you skip a few generations ahead, where rank and stature was one thing that really was still acknowledged. So, for example, using titles for people, not using first names, using last names, saying things like,

[00:42:37] no worries, no worries, instead of you're welcome. These are things that seem subtle, but they're actually all about this shift in what is considered politeness. And I think when older speakers encounter someone saying no worries or calling them by the first name, that's rude. They think that's rude. When Gen Z is using those first names or saying things like no worries, they're actually paying respect to that person.

[00:43:05] So, I mean, on both sides of that coin, it's about being polite and considerate. But what has really shifted and flipped is how that work gets done. And so, you know, as a linguist, we would say they've moved towards a negative politeness culture versus a positive politeness culture, which means we used to pay a lot of heed to stature and rank and like, oh, you've worked for years to get that job title. I'm going to acknowledge that in the way I referred to you. But now what we're respectful is to say, look, we're all equals and we understand that no

[00:43:33] matter what our financial situation is, we're all in this together and we need to come together to support each other to be a better culture. The best way to do that is to be egalitarian towards everybody, which is also something that has been around for hundreds of years. We've been moving towards that. So I think the biggest piece of advice on both sides is that no one is being rude, despite what you might think.

[00:43:58] What has shifted is the way that we express courtesy and politeness, not whether we express it or not. That would be the biggest takeaway. But maybe the way to have a conversation about that is to say, you know, as a culture, we have these different ideas about what we should respect. And can you explain what's important to you when you meet new people and you're in a workplace? If you have these kind of open conversations across generations, this is what I often tell

[00:44:26] employers when they're worried about this is, you know, have conversations about how you perceive things because that can really help you understand the other's point of view instead of just being annoyed and saying, what can I do to have them be more respectful? Or what can I do to change the way that we have this intergenerational communication? You actually have to communicate to do that. And so there can be really fun exercises where you say, OK, let's talk about what is the right

[00:44:52] answer to thank you and then have everybody pull in the room. And then people will have like some people say, no worries, no problem. But older people will tend to say it was my pleasure or you're welcome. And then have a conversation about what does that reflect? Like what's important when you're answering that? Like, why did you say that answer? And then people can really empathize and understand, OK, we're coming at this from different viewpoints, but we're all trying to be polite about it.

[00:45:18] So my biggest advice would be to communicate and have good conversations before things get to be problems. Absolutely. And I think that even just the simplest way of like, well, and I run into this, too, of people like, but how do we get on the same page about things? I'm like, well, you have to you have to ask the person why they do that thing. And then you're going to realize it's not to spite you and be mean and disrespectful. Like no one's actually trying to do that.

[00:45:44] And I think that people really boogeyman like this, this kind of distance between different generations when we're trying to communicate as if I ask, then it's like it's ruder to ask than it is to just assume. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I actually think we just need to ask like, well, why are we saying it this way? It's not wrong. I just want to know. And I think it's this kind of respectful curiosity that's necessary because once you get down to it, you're I personally am like once you get down to like understanding

[00:46:14] kind of like casual, it's actually they just want to connect with you about the thing that's most important to them. And it's not your credential. It's not your power status. It's not they want to connect with you for the human that you are. And you're like, actually, that's cuter than I thought it was going to be. They're not just trying to disrespect me. It is. And I but I do also think that, you know, there are some lessons for Gen Z in this as well, because, you know, solidarity is great.

[00:46:39] And really, they've moved towards what's called camaraderie politeness, which means what we value as a Gen Z person is that we connect and that we see each other as human. And you do. I definitely get that vibe from my students a lot. But that doesn't always make you successful. Right. I think just as much as older generations can learn from Gen Z about being more open to diversity and sort of differences of thought and speech. Right. Gen Z also has to be open to the fact that, well, that doesn't always work in every

[00:47:09] circumstance. And so in a professional setting, you do need to address someone in a higher position of you carefully in a way that, you know, you're paying heed to the fact that they have spent 20 more years in this job than you and might know better how to do something. And so that's not always the case. Sometimes people are just assholes. Right. But reality is that there needs to be some give and take on both sides.

[00:47:36] There is no solution that is only one sided in this scenario. Absolutely. Well, Valerie, this has been just so enlightening. Again, I feel like I could talk to you three times a week about things that pop around in my brain. But I know people will probably want to follow along with your work. Where can we send people to stay in touch with the great work that you're doing and helping us understand language and it's important in our importance in our society? Where can we send people?

[00:48:02] Well, the best place to find me and just find out what I'm doing is my website, which is just Valerie Friedland dot com. Or, of course, I have a couple of books out. You can grab those if you want to know more about these types of issues. I am not super active on social media, but I do have an Instagram account that's called like literally dude, which was the name of my first book that sometimes I often get tanned on a reels and then we repost that that are telling you about things I'm doing.

[00:48:30] But I would say that really the best way is just you can sign up or subscribe on my website and I send out not often. I don't want to litter people's inboxes, but usually about every two months or so a message about what I'm doing, what I'm up to or some articles I've written, those kinds of things. Wonderful. Valerie, thank you for being here and really taking us to school on understanding language. I really enjoyed our conversation. Absolutely. It's been a blast. Thanks for having me.

[00:49:03] Before we wrap up here, a few things I'm taking away from my conversation with Valerie. First, language changing isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's kind of just what language does. Every generation takes what already exists and makes it their own. Instead of immediately writing off a new word, phrase, or way of speaking as something that's wrong. What if we got curious about where it came from and what it might tell us about the people that are using it?

[00:49:30] Second, how we communicate says a lot about what we value. Generation Z's more casual communication style can sometimes be interpreted as unprofessional or even disrespectful. But Valerie reminds us that it can actually come from a desire for equality and connection. Something as simple as saying no worries instead of you're welcome can reflect a completely different idea of what it means to be polite.

[00:49:57] And third, pay attention to who and what is influencing the way you communicate. Our language isn't only shaped by the people around us anymore. Social media has expanded our communities. Algorithms influence what we see. And AI is increasingly influencing what and how we write. Valerie's point about living in an age of curation is a good reminder to intentionally seek out perspectives beyond what our feeds are serving us.

[00:50:25] And finally, when generations communicate differently, ask something before you assume it. Instead of deciding someone is being rude, out of touch, or unprofessional, ask why they might communicate the way they do. A little respectful curiosity can reveal that two generations may be trying to accomplish the exact same thing. They've just learned how to do it in different ways in terms of expressing it. Language will keep changing.

[00:50:50] We don't have to keep up with every new slang word, but we can use those differences as an opportunity to better understand one another. Now, we'd love to hear about it. What's stuck with you? Maybe what's a word or phrase you've recently learned about that made you think differently? You can share about it on Spotify in the listener comment section, or you can follow, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Your engagement helps other people find these conversations and learn along with us.

[00:51:18] This season has been so much fun so far, and we still have a few more months of episodes ahead. But we're always looking for new topics to explore and guests to connect with. So if you have a recommendation for us, feel free to head over to our website, strategieswithgrace.com slash podcast, and send us a note. If you want to connect with me directly, you can find me on LinkedIn or on Instagram at Megan M. Grace so that we can keep these conversations going.

[00:51:47] I couldn't do this without the Gen Z team behind the scenes who brought this episode to life. This episode was edited and produced by Callie Waters. Thank you again for stopping by. Let's continue this conversation, and we'll chat soon.