Language, and what it reveals about human behavior, has always fascinated linguist Adam Aleksic. “Language is a really cool proxy for human behavior,” he says. “It’s our way of capturing what reality is, and then a way of relating that to each other. It’s a mechanism for understanding who we are and what’s going on.”
The 24 year-old Harvard graduate turned content creator has amassed an audience well into the millions across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. Known for his short but insightful educational linguistics videos, Aleksic is not new to the game. “In high school I was a Reddit influencer just for fun,” he laughs. “I wasn’t making any money, but it was an early experiment in virality and seeing what can go viral.”
Armed with a formal background in linguistics, Aleksic sifted through research papers, data, and surveys of middle schoolers and their educators to craft a new book that guides readers through the uncharted linguistic currents on social media that are changing how we communicate—online and off.
“We’re at a new inflection point, characterized by personally recommended short-form video content,” Aleksic writes in Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. “All channels of communication—advertising, education, news, entertainment—are gravitating toward the medium by necessity, because that’s what people have been conditioned to consume.”
The ‘algospeak’ era is an opportunity of sorts, Aleksic says, for the creation of new grammatical rules, accents and dialects that are driven by the nature of virality (think: influencers using slang words and aesthetics to ascend rank on the internet) and circumventing community guidelines (yes, your kids are using “unalive” online as a euphemism for death by suicide/homicide, and it started on TikTok).
The “Etymology Nerd,” as he’s known online, explores linguistic trends in communities and fandoms across the internet and beyond in Algospeak.
From Taylor Swift fanilects and linguistic appropriation to the rise of “-core” aesthetics and personalized “recommended” feeds (spoiler: you built your “algorithm” yourself, brick by brick, as the kids say), Aleksic breaks down the whys and hows behind today’s biggest social media trends with the same sharp, balanced insight he brings to his well-researched videos.
“Every day, to do my daily videos, I sit down in a cafe for a few hours and I look at research papers,” he says. “I don’t see anyone online sourcing their sources in their videos, which is crazy to me, but I’m meticulous with that.”
“Anyone making educational content should be very deliberately treating social media through an academic lens, and make it clear where information is coming from, make clear what our credentials are, because it is hard to know what to trust online.”
With billions of users uploading more data every day than the Library of Congress could ever store, the sheer scale of language online is overwhelming for anyone, even linguists, to sift through and analyze, Aleksic says.
“I never want to make a moral judgment. I think the internet and algorithms are tools,” Aleksic says. “And like any tools, they can be used for good and bad. … I do think it’s concerning that these platforms are forcing all communication to be commodified, attention-grabbing mechanisms, but I’ve seen it used for good.”
“I don’t think language is suffering at all,” he says, “because at the end of the day, it’s a way for us to relate to each other, to feel good with one another. And that’s how we’re going to continue to use it, and always going to use it because we’re humans.”
Culturally, the author explains, there are other implications to be concerned about—including how algorithms are affecting our perceptions of reality and fragmenting our attention spans. “There is so much convincing research that that stuff is bad for us, but language is always the canary in the coal mine for culture as a whole,” he says. “I hope through this book people can also draw their own conclusions about what’s going on on a broader scale.”
Algospeak isn’t merely a byproduct of life online; it’s proof that we’re at a pivotal moment in the digital age, where language itself is bending to algorithmic pressures. As people reshape words to dodge content moderation or signal connection with their community, Algospeak highlights that these shifts reveal deeper dynamics. Paying attention to how we speak online can tell us a lot about who we are, and who’s in control.
“Culture is, at the end of the day, subjective,” Aleksic says. “But if you look at where the words are coming from, if you look at these conduits of language change, you will also see the conduits of power and of societal change as a whole.”
Adam Aleksic speaks at 6-7pm on July 18 at Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park. keplers.org
