Algospeak review: An essential update on how social media is turbocharging language

Algospeak
Adam Aleksic (Ebury (UK, 17 July) Knopf (US, 15 July))

Nothing makes you feel old like being bamboozled by slang. Even the chapter titles of Adam Aleksic’s Algospeak: How social media is transforming the future of language have this effect. “Sticking Out Your Gyat For The Rizzler” and “Wordpilled Slangmaxxing” remind me that, as a millennial, I am as close in age to boomers as I am to today’s Generation Alpha.

Aleksic, a linguist and content creator (@etymologynerd), sets out to illuminate a new era of language innovation driven by social media, particularly short-form video platforms such as TikTok. The “algospeak” of the book’s title is conventionally used to describe euphemisms and other ways to get round online censorship, with recent examples including “unalive” (referencing death or suicide) or “seggs” (sex).

But the author makes the case for expanding the definition to include all aspects of language influenced by “the algorithm” — which is itself a euphemistic term to describe the various, often highly secretive processes social media platforms use to decide which content to serve to users and in what order.

Aleksic draws on his experience making a living online — in his case, through educational videos about language. Like any content creator, he is incentivised to appease the algorithm, and this means choosing words carefully. A video he made on the etymology of the word “pen” (tracing back to the Latin “penis”) fell foul of sexual content rules, while another analysing the controversial slogan “from the river to the sea” had its reach limited.

Meanwhile, videos on trending Gen Alpha terms, such as “skibidi” (a largely nonsense word with roots in scat singing) and “gyat” (“goddamn” or “ass”), performed particularly well. His experiences show how creators adapt their language for algorithmic gains, causing certain words to spread further online and, in the most successful cases, offline too. When Aleksic surveyed school teachers, he found many such terms have become regular classroom slang; some children even learn the word “unalive” before “suicide”.

He is sharpest on his special subject, etymology, tracing how the algorithm propels words from online subcultures into the internet mainstream. The misogynistic incel community is the most prolific contributor to modern slang, he says, precisely because it is so radicalised, which can supercharge the development of an in-group language.

Aleksic remains mostly non-judgmental about language trends. “Unalive”, he points out, is really no different from earlier euphemisms such as “deceased”, while “skibidi” is akin to “Scooby-Doo”. It is only recently that we categorised slang in terms of arbitrarily defined generations, which he argues is often inaccurate and lends a toxic framing to normal language evolution.

Things are slightly more complex when words owe their mainstream use to cultural appropriation. A lot of today’s slang terms, like “cool” before them, can be traced back to Black communities ( “thicc”, “bruh”). Others have roots in the LGBTQ ballroom scene (“slay”, “yass”, “queen”). Widespread adoption can divorce these words from their history, which is often tied to social struggles, and can even reinforce negative stereotypes about the communities that spawned them.

It is hard to prevent this context collapse — such is the fate of successful slang. Social media has rapidly shortened timelines of linguistic innovation, which makes Algospeak an essential update, but also leads to it becoming out of date quickly. The underlying insights on how technology shapes language, however, will stay relevant — as long as the algorithm has its way.

Victoria Turk is a London-based writer

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