2 Gen Alphas tried to teach a millennial how to text without sounding old. Here are their rules.

• In an interview with a millennial, two Gen Alphas explained the rules of texting among young people.
• They outlined their grammar rules, emoji usage, and their stance on voice memos.

In an interview conducted through an iPad in true Gen Alpha style, two girls explained the texting etiquette in their friendship group to a baffled millennial, describing their grammar use, emoji selection, and their feelings about voice memos.

Gen Alphas are sometimes referred to as "mini millennials" because of the similarities they share with the generation that many of their parents belong to. But it turns out that these similarities only go so far — and they stop completely when it comes to texting etiquette.

Nicole Pellegrino, a millennial who works in social media strategy, demonstrated this in a video posted on November 28, in which she recorded an iPad "interview" with her Gen Alpha sister and her best friend to discuss their texting etiquette.

Here's what she learned.

Good grammar is bad news

She kicked off the videocall by questioning why the girls wrote in all lowercase letters.

"Full sentences is like a school thing, and we should leave the school stuff at school," replied one girl.

The other agreed. "Normal texting seems too professional," she said.

Both of the girls said they only use proper grammar if they get upset or mad. One added, "If I get mad, I'll pull out all the correct grammar."

Emoji etiquette is complicated

Next, Pellegrino pointed out how few emojis the girls use in their texts, and asked whether it was intentional. One girl said that it wasn't intentional, but that "there are just a lot of emojis that aren't good."

Pellegrino laughed and asked if they meant the cry-laughing emoji, which is associated with millennials and often ridiculed by Gen Alphas and Gen Zers for being uncool or cringe. The girls agreed that they wouldn't use it.

Acceptable Gen Alpha options included the heart-hands emoji, red heart, crying, and cat and monkey emojis.

"Oh, so the animals showing expression — that's OK?" questioned Pellegrino. The girls agreed that it was.

As for using emojis to react to messages, that's OK in some circumstances. For example, if a friend sent you a long paragraph on a "random Tuesday" and you didn't feel like sending a paragraph back, you could react to it with the heart emoji, one girl explained.

Bad news for voice memo fans

Both girls agreed that using voice memos was not OK. Pellegrino looked shocked.

"No voice memos?" she asked.

"No way," said one girl.

When Pellegrino said that she and her 30-year-old friends use voice memos to communicate, one of the girls told her that she had to "stop doing that."

"It's not that hard to type," she said.

Ouch.

However, if typing still feels like too much, the Gen Alphas suggested that she could use the voice-to-text feature to write text messages instead. In fact, both girls said they use this to write their school essays.

"It's just so much easier," said one.

Lots of viewers were shocked by this revelation. "I was flabbergasted. I have to type so quickly at work. Writing essays on a computer helped so much with becoming a fast typer," wrote one viewer.

But not everyone found it weird. A couple of viewers wrote that they also used voice-to-text to write their essays, and that they found it useful.

In general, some viewers seemed to feel a little judged by the young girls, and one even said they didn't think millennials were this judgemental to other generations.

"We were brutal to the boomers," someone pointed out.

Millennials, Gen Zers, and increasingly, Gen Alphas, often poke fun at one another online. Gen Zers regularly make fun of millennials for wearing skinny jeans, using outdated phrases, and posting boomerangs on Instagram. Millennials fire back by mocking Gen Z's attitude towards work or their penchant for Y2K-style fashion.

With Gen Alpha on the rise, both older generations may start to feel less relevant, and Pellegrino has created videos based on these tensions before. On November 26, she asked the girls to explain Gen Alpha slang to her and expressed confusion at some of the terms they used.

For their part, Gen Zers are already predicting how Gen Alphas — who have become known for their bizarre sense of humor and memes — will mock them.

Coming for millennial texting choices may be just the beginning.