Change is the only constant — or ‘the vibes are always shifting’ as Gen Z would put it — where language is concerned. Since early humans first learnt to communicate using sounds and then gave those sounds meaning and visual forms, humanity has always been in search of more efficient and economical ways of making themselves understood. Sanskrit, for instance, inspired simplified — democratised? — linguistic forms like Prakrit, Apabhramsa and Hindi. Such changes are usually dictated by the needs of and the changes in the times — a case in point is modern English as the world
knows it today. The language was moulded by the invention of the printing press and by the constraints that this new technology placed on the script. It is thus not surprising that at a time when technology is transforming how humans communicate all over again — abbreviations, speech-to-text conversion and even emojis are all the rage now — language itself is taking on a form that older generations (the ‘cheugy’ in Gen Z speak) find incomprehensible.
Research has found that the latest linguistic storm in this generational teacup is Gen Z’s aversion to capital letters. For Zoomers, lowercase writing is not only a stylistic preference but also a cultural marker, reflecting their values and attitudes towards tradition. Lowercase writing, often without punctuation, has become a way to symbolically reject the authority and the rigidity associated with traditional grammar. While purists may feel inclined to borrow the Zoomer phrase, ‘big yikes’ — it suggests shock — to express their disapproval of this trend, lowercase writing is not really new. In fact, even the Romans, whose script forms the basis of both capital and small letters, used capitalisation only on large displays such as stone cuttings. Since writing in capitals was highly inefficient, most people used a fast, hand-written version, which later became the lowercase alphabet. But this ‘capital war’ continued to thrive even after the formalisation of the script into upper and lower cases: the Brothers Grimm, for instance, had declared that people who capitalise nouns are pedants. Could it then be the case that Zoomers are, ironically, returning to tradition by demanding the simplification of English-language writing?
But the Zoomers are double-faced creatures as well. The motive of simplification does not inform all the licences that Gen Z takes with the English language. What, for example, can explain the Zoomers’ usage of ‘dank’ — usually associated with unpleasant things — to mean something of very high quality or the substitution of cool with ‘drip’, again a word that perhaps brings to mind leaking roofs? One could argue that such an eccentric attitude towards language, even in the most serious of settings, is only to be expected from a generation that has come of age during a time of great instability. After all, pandemics, wars, and record-high unemployment and temperatures would undoubtedly leave their mark on the predominant language and even contribute to the evolution of a distinctive vocabulary. But the point is this: language’s survival, indeed evolution, depends on its enrichment, not debasement. By speaking a language that eludes easy comprehension, could Gen Z be doing a disservice not only to English but also to the language that is needed to understand this generation?