Gen-Alpha Slang on Social Media

Kovaliv U. Gen-Alpha Slang on Social Media : bachelor’s thesis : 035 Philology / supervised by A. Karaban. Kyiv, 2025. 123 р.

This thesis investigates the morphosyntactic and sociolinguistic features of Generation Alpha’s youth slang as it functions in digital environments. The relevance of the study lies in the rapid transformation of youth language under the influence of social media, as well as the limited academic attention given to the slang of the youngest generation, those raised in a fully digital context.
The object of the study is slang as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, and the subject is Generation Alpha slang on social media platforms. The aim of the research is to analyze the structural, grammatical, and sociocultural characteristics of contemporary youth slang in its natural online use. The objectives include: outlining key theoretical approaches to slang, characterizing Generation Alpha in the digital context, analyzing word-formation models, part-of-speech behavior, syntactic structures, communicative functions, and sociolinguistic markers in youth speech.
The study material consists of a corpus of 572 examples representing 21 slang items, collected from TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and X (Twitter) between 2023 and 2025. The research applies both qualitative and quantitative methods, including descriptive, etymological, morphological analysis, POS tagging, bigram and trigram analysis, as well as functional analysis of slang constructions.
The findings reveal that conversion is the most productive word-formation mechanism (81% of terms), and that the slang demonstrates high grammatical flexibility. Frequent structures include attributive constructions, compound noun phrases, and meme-based speech templates. Five core functions of slang were identified: conveying emotion/informality (34.8%), group identity (23.2%), creativity (18.4%), in-group/out-group marking (14.8%), and norm-challenging (8.8%). AAVE (African American Vernacular English) borrowings play a significant role in shaping the slang, reflecting stylized appropriation and digital indexicality. The study confirms that Generation Alpha slang is not chaotic vocabulary, but a functionally rich, grammatically flexible, and socially marked expressive system.