According to The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, naming the latest youth generation has become something of a problem. The last “generation” tagged by sociologists was Generation Z, born between the early- to mid- 1990s and the early 2000s. With the English alphabet exhausted, some experts are experimenting with punctuation marks and even the Khoisan languages of the Bushmen in Southern Africa, who use click consonants as phonemes.
The clicks involve a sucking action by the tongue, but the position of the tongue and the way in which air is released into the mouth vary; thus clicks may be dental, alveolar, alveolo-palatal, cerebral, lateral, labial, or retroflex; voiced, voiceless, or nasal; aspirated or glottal.
“Any one of those would do nicely,” explained Steve Choatley, professor of anthropology at New Kingsley College in Florida. “But finding a symbol to represent the sound will be difficult.”
Labeling the new generation is especially important to marketers and advertisers, he said, and ad agencies are frustrated by the delay by scholars in properly tagging this latest eager wave of consumers.
“It’s crucial we come up with something soon,” Choatley said. “The economy depends on it, and a lost generation is drifting toward irrelevance.”
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