Picture the family group chat. Mum signs off “Love, Mum XXX” with a love heart, in case you didn’t know who it was. Dad answers everything with a single thumbs-up. Your younger cousin types in lowercase with no punctuation at all. And somewhere, someone’s Nan is still sure LOL means “lots of love.”
Four generations, one conversation, and everyone is speaking a slightly different language.
It’s tempting to call this a breakdown in communication, but really it’s what language has always done: evolved, one generation at a time. And if you look at why each generation talks the way it does, the pattern makes a surprising amount of sense.
Every channel invents its own manners
Telegrams charged by the word, so people wrote like ransom notes: ARRIVING TUESDAY STOP. Early mobile phones gave you 160 characters per text, and each one cost money, so a whole generation wrote gr8 and c u l8r. Once unlimited texting arrived, that shorthand vanished almost overnight.
Today’s version is lowercase. Your phone capitalises automatically, so writing “hey quick q” in lowercase takes a small, deliberate effort. What looks lazy is actually a choice. Every generation’s “bad habits” turn out to be adaptations to the technology it grew up with.
Punctuation became a tone of voice
Linguist Gretchen McCulloch makes a great point in her book Because Internet. We used to have formal writing and casual speech, and texting created a third thing: casual writing that behaves like speech. Without a face or a voice to read, we built a new tone of voice from the keyboard. ALL CAPS is shouting. Lowercase is relaxed. A full stop is serious. “okaaay” is drawn out. It’s not sloppy. It’s expressive, and anyone fluent reads it instantly.
Why formal stopped meaning trustworthy
This is the big shift. For decades, corporate language was a sign of credibility. “Dear Sir/Madam” and “Kind regards” meant you were dealing with a proper, established business. Millennials had that voice drilled into them early, often by managers who insisted that professional meant polished.
Gen Z grew up with something different: spin, fine print, and scam texts written in perfect official language. So for them, formal can read as distant, even a little evasive, while casual reads as honest. It’s why brands with a cheeky, human voice (Duolingo’s chaotic owl on TikTok being the famous example) build real followings, and why “I hope this email finds you well” now sounds like it came from a system rather than a person.
It also explains how they approach businesses. “hey girlie! do you guys do weekend bookings?” in an Instagram DM at 10pm isn’t rude. It’s how they’d talk to anyone they trust. And they’re not actually anti-phone. Plenty will happily call when they choose to. What they avoid is being rung out of the blue or left on hold. It comes back to control, not the channel itself.
Australia had a head start
Here’s the good news for local businesses: Aussies have always been informal. We say “no worries” and “cheers,” call the boss by their first name, and give everything a nickname. In many ways, Gen Z’s way of talking is just a very Australian way of talking, and the rest of the world is catching up. The leap is much smaller for us than for a stiff corporate culture elsewhere, as long as we don’t bury that natural warmth under templates.
Language is how we spot our people
There’s a deeper reason this matters. Shared language is one of the oldest ways humans signal you’re one of us. When someone speaks your dialect, your brain relaxes and you’re more open to what they’re saying. When they don’t, something quietly flags them as an outsider, often before you’ve properly read the message.
A message that’s correct but sounds like a 2009 template can land as “not from my world,” and the audience tunes out without really knowing why.
Everyone already speaks several dialects. You talk one way to your nan, another to your boss, and another in the group chat. Nobody calls that fake. It’s just social fluency, the everyday skill of knowing who you’re talking to.
Businesses need exactly the same skill. Not a trendy new voice, and not an emoji in every message, just the habit of stopping to ask who’s on the other end and how they talk. For some customers, that means a phone call and a proper greeting. For others, it’s a text, a DM, or a friendly reply to a 10pm “hey quick q.” Most of the time it means offering both, and letting them choose.
Every generation brings its own language, and none of them is wrong.