A viral linguist's account of the ways our vocabularies are evolving, the internet's influence on communication, and what our use of language reveals about the modern world
From the rise of leetspeak and words such as "unalive" to the trend of adding "-core" to different influencer aesthetics, the internet has ushered in an unprecedented linguistic upheaval. We're entering an entirely new era of etymology, heralded by the invisible forces driving social media algorithms. Thankfully, Algospeak is here to explain. As a professional linguist, Adam Aleksic understands the gravity of language and the way we use it: he knows the ways it has morphed and changed, how it reflects society, and how, in its everyday usage, we carry centuries of human history on our tongues. As a social media influencer, Aleksic is also intimately familiar with the internet's reach and how social media impacts the way we engage with one another. New slang emerges and goes viral overnight. Accents are shaped or erased on YouTube. Grammatical rules, loopholes, and patterns surface and transform language as we know. Our interactions-and our social norms and habits-shift into something completely different.
As Aleksic uses original surveys, data, and internet archival research to usher us through this new linguistic landscape, he also illuminates how communication is changing in both familiar and unprecedented ways. From our use of emojis to sentence structure to the ways younger generations talk about sex and death (see unalive in English and desvivirse in Spanish), we are in a brand-new world, one shaped by algorithms and technology. Algospeak is an energetic, astonishing journey into language, the internet, and what this intersection means for all of us. ADAM ALEKSIC graduated in 2023 with a degree in linguistics from Harvard, where he served as president of the Harvard Linguistics Society. He's discussed online language on NPR, and his work has appeared in the Washington Post and has been mentioned in The Guardian, HuffPost and The Daily Beast. He's lectured on language and social media at Georgetown and has forthcoming lectures at Stanford and UPenn, which will be a TEDx talk. Based in New York, Adam has spent the last year traveling the world, finding #etymology content wherever he goes.
