Slang, Identity, and Communication: A Synchronic Analysis of Gen Z's Linguistic Practices Through Wattpad Stories

Slang is shifting so rapidly that it can be challenging for individuals from other generations or those unfamiliar with digital culture to understand and keep up with learning communication gaps and barriers. Despite these difficulties, Gen Z slang is essential to their identity and communication. The study seeks to identify the unique features of Generation Z language in Wattpad Stories using the three most popular Wattpad stories currently listed on the hot list for the short story category. A heuristic checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories developed by Leech and Short (2007) is used for thorough analysis, enabling a critical evaluation of linguistic descriptions by assessing the lexical, grammatical, figures of speech, context, and cohesion aspects. The findings showed that the authors predominantly utilized Gen Z vocabulary. It possesses compounding, acronyms, conversion, derivation, inflection, and onomatopoeic words. Furthermore, most of the text exhibits a low level of formality and contains only a limited number of idiomatic terms and notable collocations. Finally, most of them consist of simple sentences, utilize figures of speech, such as hyperbole and metaphor, and most of the text in context and cohesion is written from a first-person perspective. This study aids in understanding the communication styles of Gen Z students to see how crucial it is to close the generational divide between students and teachers.