Millennial speak

I have always been puzzled by the way our millennials communicate with each other. I understand as a person belonging to a different generation that to engage meaningfully in an exchange with a millennial, I may need to have a certain understanding of some of their ‘cryptic’ codes in communicating.

Such is the concern that I always encounter. There should already be a millennial dictionary to document their unique lexicon. A friend of mine who happened to receive in Messenger the comment, I kennat! wondered if millennials today still know how to spell correctly. The phrase sounds correct but spelled differently. Still this should not be bothersome for us, for it is how people of their generation and their language evolve. Suffice it to say that past generations of people also had their unique vocabulary that millennials may also find strange. They may also wonder what the words spoken by their lolos and lolas, titos and titas, daddy and mommy meant. Words such as jeprox, groovy, ermat/erpat, mega would also not ring a bell for the millennials precisely because they were not yet born when these were the common expressions.

Although this year’s theme for the celebration of Buwan ng Wika is silent about millennial speak, this language has a significant influence in the daily lives of millennials and it is one of the keys to understanding them better.

What is the invitation to us and how do we relate to our millennials through language? The best thing to do is to give our utmost support to their endeavors so that they will feel our presence IRL (In Real Life). And also that they will avoid experiencing ‘ghosting’ because we will always be ready to appear in their lives should some of those they truly trust suddenly abandon them. After all the support we have given, then perhaps the millennials would have exclaimed that their life is such a GOAT (Greatest Of All Time), and that they have found the best fam (family) they could ever have, and thus no more FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).

We cannot avoid that generations of people change with each having its own peculiarities. Therefore, we just have to be flexible and adaptable to changing contexts especially of our students so that we can enter their world and have a better understanding of their lives. By the time the millennials have been overtaken by Generation Z, which I feel is already happening now, I wonder how different Generation Z lingo will be? I’m shookt!

Fr. Alfonso A. Araceli, SVD

University of San Carlos