Hey, Chat

Teens are taking slang from the screen to the schoolyard. It’s reshaping the way that they connect with each other and the world.

Nov 03, 20245:40 AM

Photo illustration by Slate. Images via Getty Images Plus.

Shyla Carter was recently beefing with a classmate. The 13-year-old set down her math homework as she described the issue to her former teacher, JP Peralta. The miscommunication began in person, she clarified, but quickly trickled online. Carter, frustrated with the way it was handled on social media, decided to delete her Instagram and TikTok. Too many things are baiting her rage right now: interpersonally, politically, internationally.

She heaved a sigh. “I see so many things that be making me want to scream,” she said. “I don’t know, chat.”

Carter likes using the word “chat” to address people. It can be used to address her friends all together, her friends individually, and sometimes her family members. It’s both singular and plural. It’s both second and third person. Everybody, regardless of the size of the intended audience, is chat. “I say it all day long,” she said. “In any situation.”

The terms “chat” and “chat is this real” have exploded in popularity over the past few years. The term, originally used in contexts like “chat, this real?” to “chat, am I cooked?” stems from the world of Twitch and Discord, as streamers ask their audience for clarification, support, and answers—all within the confines of the stream’s chat window, where viewers can communicate with the streamer through text. But now, it’s become adopted as IRL slang, used in any context, for any reason at all.

Popularized by gamers like iShowSpeed in 2023, the term originally began as creators ironically asked their followers to identify obviously doctored or A.I.-generated content presented to them during their live streams (“Chat is this real?”). As it moved through TikTok and Instagram, the term focused solely on the plural possessive, as people jokingly addressed their intangible audiences. In spaces like r/Teachers on Reddit, educators have shared hundreds of stories about the moniker taking over classrooms.

“My friends around me watch a lot of Twitch and livestream, so they get it from Kai Cenat and Duke Dennis, people like that,” Carter said. “I use it for people around me. Like, ‘Yo chat, come here.’ ”

Peralta, who teaches drama to students in kindergarten through sixth grade, said that it’s not uncommon nowadays to see the structures of social media–comment etiquette bleed into interpersonal interactions among his students. “Chat” is one of the most common, used frequently between students and even between Peralta and his class. He said it often begins around late elementary to early middle school, dovetailing with the nascent stages of puberty.

“I can’t say I’m from Ohio,” he said, referencing the popular, post-ironic replacement slang term for cringe that quickly became oversaturated as more mainstream attention was brought to it, “or I’ll just lose the class.”

Of course, among older people, anything involving children and the internet is primed to inspire concern. Much hand-wringing has already been written about Gen Alpha being illiterate iPad babies who are doomed to a society of our own making, but Carter doesn’t think the rise of “chat” is any more special than the popularization of any other slang term. She wouldn’t use “chat” in a context like school, particularly concerning unfamiliar peers or authority figures. It’s simply derived from their pop culture, and adds a bit more humor and energy to the conversation.

Darlene Intlekofer, a sociolinguistics instructor at CUNY Graduate Center, told me that slang often helps develop a communal sense of identity and social code among peers. Terms like “chat” also speak to the cultural norms being shaped among young people—notably, the desire to cope with the natural stress or anxiety of growing up with humor and lightheartedness. “I think it shows that young people value inclusivity in group interactions, and I love that about this generation,” Intlekofer said.

The language does offer contextual distinctions from other monikers used to address a group of people. Intlekofer notes that her 11-year-old daughter and her friends have all expressed feelings of social anxiety to her. For them, using “chat” can often function as an icebreaker when addressing people in the second person.

“One friend said that Gen Alpha has grown up witnessing confrontations—think ‘Karen’ memes, where people aggressively confront others in public,” Intlekofer said. “They said they’ve learned to avoid these kinds of confrontations by using softer, less direct communication, and ‘chat’ is a perfect example of that. It keeps things casual and nonthreatening, which can help ease the social pressures they face.”

But Peralta emphasizes that many of these concerns—a desire to be seen as funny, popular, and in the know by your peers—are often normal of any child entering puberty. The difference, he said, is that now children can see directly who is at the top of the likable pecking order, simply by swiping up and seeing whose comments and posts got the most likes.

“It’s the same stuff we’ve been seeing, but we can point a finger more specifically at what we’re looking at,” he said. “They see these videos and think, ‘I see a quantitative measure of how funny this is. So if I mimic it, I can be funny, too.’ Or ‘If I see something crazy or out of pocket, I can be funny, too.’ ”

Peralta has said he and his colleagues have noticed an issue among students where ideas of wit, humor, and aspirational personality are conflated with whoever has the top-liked comment. The roast battles among students at school could be ripped right out of a TikTok comments section. And while it’s not new for preteens to say outrageous things to one another in the hopes of currying popularity, Peralta has noticed a direct trickle-down from the internet in terms of how things are said.

“It’s one of those things we constantly have to defuse,” he said. “It’s usually the kids who want to be funny who will repeat things that they hear or say that performed well online.”

The language of “getting ratioed” and “owned” are through lines of this, Peralta added. “TikTok comment trends get traded back and forth on the daily,” he said.

Sometimes, the language and words they use from the internet are much more problematic. He references a phrase that was said in school that stemmed from a phrase that often crops up under women’s posts online, where users leave scourges of comments on female creators’ videos, saying “it’s bubblegum pink,” referencing the creator’s … “It’s not [the students] trying to make a sexual remark,” Peralta explained. “It’s repeating something that you understand enough to know it’s inflammatory but not enough to know how harmful and unsafe it is.”

It’s a reality that will inevitably happen as the internet becomes an all-encompassing space for young people navigating the world. Industries catering to preteens have crumbled as social media has become the epicenter of cultural dissemination, with tween fashion and beauty largely being folded into brands that cater to adults.

Children and adults are consuming the same content, and that content will inevitably inform their socialization. And while the question of responsibility and blame gets shifted from creators to parents to governments to tech companies, Peralta said it’s less about punishing students and more about being honest with them, as well as giving them the fundamental instruction and perspective on how to navigate their reality.

“I’m perhaps not giving enough credit to the fact that there are so many kids who are really well-socialized and have a great handle on this thing,” he said. “This crazy antisocial behavior stands out more than it ever has because you can point to all these different causes, but there are so many kids who have more tools in their tool bag than I’ve ever seen.”

Carter thinks it’s simply a result of not knowing when to keep online things online and offline things off. The problem with this very beef was the way that things trickled online, where miscommunication became even more frayed with subtweets and shade. And she’s not alone. Peralta said that many students have expressed the desire to live in an age where they didn’t have to deal with the complications and sensationalism of social media. But they’re the only ones who really understand each other’s problems.

“If I can just delete it, I won’t have to be mad,” Carter reasoned. “Who wants to be mad? Not me.”

She gathered her books, math homework completed. She showed Peralta and me the finished sheet before heading out for the evening. “Later, chat,” she said.

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