Every few years, someone publishes an essay arguing that young people are ruining the language. The culprits change — text-speak, social media, TikTok slang, “literally” used for emphasis — but the alarm is always the same. We are, apparently, in the middle of a linguistic catastrophe that will leave future generations unable to communicate clearly.
Linguists find this baffling. Not because language isn’t changing — it absolutely is — but because it has always been changing, and the people doing the most changing have always been accused of destroying it.
What Is Slang, Exactly?
Slang is informal vocabulary that’s specific to a group, community, or time period. It’s fast-moving, context-dependent, and often deliberately opaque to outsiders. That opacity is part of the point. When teenagers develop slang, one of its functions is to create an in-group — a language variety that signals belonging and, yes, excludes adults.
This is not a modern phenomenon. In 16th-century England, thieves and vagabonds used a specialized vocabulary called cant — words like “cly the jerk” (get whipped) and “dup the jerk” (open the door) — that served the same function: communication within the group, confusion outside it.
Slang has been around as long as people have organized themselves into groups.
Has Slang Ever Destroyed a Language?
No. Not once. Not in any documented case.
What does destroy a language is when its speakers are killed, dispersed, or forcibly prevented from using it — as happened to dozens of indigenous languages under colonial policies. What doesn’t destroy a language is teenagers saying “no cap” or dropping their g’s at the end of words.
The reason is structural. Languages are extraordinarily robust systems. They’re not fragile collections of correct words that shatter when someone uses them wrong. They’re dynamic rule-governed systems that self-regulate over time. Change happens constantly, but it’s not chaos — it follows patterns, it’s gradual, and it doesn’t strip out the capacity for complex expression.
Slang Becomes Standard All the Time
Here’s the thing the anti-slang argument never quite grapples with: today’s slang is often tomorrow’s standard vocabulary. The word “okay” was 19th-century slang, probably coined as a jokey abbreviation. “Mob,” which now appears in formal English, was originally condemned as a vulgar shortening of the Latin phrase “mobile vulgus.” “Silly” used to mean “blessed.” “Nice” used to mean “foolish.”
Language change is directional but not degradation. When slang terms get absorbed into mainstream use, they fill a gap or replace a clunkier phrase. They don’t hollow out the language — they add to it.
This is what linguists call lexical enrichment. The vocabulary of English today is vastly larger than it was in Shakespeare’s time, and much of that growth came from informal registers — slang, jargon, borrowings — that were initially resisted by gatekeepers.
So Why Do People Think It’s Harmful?
The instinct makes psychological sense even if it’s linguistically wrong. Language is bound up with identity, education, and social signaling. When someone uses language in a way that diverges from the form you were taught, it can feel like a loss of shared ground — or a sign that the other person hasn’t met a certain standard.
There’s also a real distinction between register and correctness. Slang that belongs in a group chat doesn’t belong in a cover letter. Knowing when to switch registers — casual to formal, spoken to written — is a genuine skill, and one worth developing. But this is a question of appropriateness, not of the language itself being damaged.
When teachers complain that students can’t write formally, the problem isn’t that the students use slang. The problem is that they haven’t yet learned to switch registers on demand. That’s teachable. And fixing it doesn’t require us to eliminate informal speech — which we couldn’t do even if we wanted to.
What About “Literally”?
This one comes up often because it seems like a clear-cut case of misuse: people say “I literally died laughing” when they did not, in fact, die. Doesn’t this word now mean the opposite of what it used to?
Not exactly. “Literally” used as an intensifier is well-documented going back to the 18th century. Jane Austen used it this way. So did Dickens and Thackeray. When words get used as intensifiers, they often undergo what linguists call semantic bleaching — the original meaning fades as the word takes on emotional force. It happened to “really,” “actually,” “totally,” and “absolutely” too. Nobody objects to those.
What This Means for You
Using slang doesn’t make you a bad communicator. It makes you a human participant in a living language. What matters is knowing your audience and your context — using casual language with friends, formal language in professional settings, and having enough range to move between them comfortably.
Language change isn’t a sign that things are falling apart. It’s a sign that the language is still alive, still being used, still belonging to the people who speak it. The languages that stop changing are the ones nobody speaks anymore.