Is your kid is speaking Italian gibberish? Blame this Gen Alpha brainrot meme

It’s giving… espresso-induced insanity.If your 10-year-old suddenly starts yelling “tralaero tralala!” while pirouetting like a caffeinated ballerina, you’re not hallucinating. You’ve just been hit with a full-blown case of “Italian Brainrot” — Gen Alpha’s latest hyper-online obsession that makes “Skibidi Toilet” look like Shakespeare.Forget pasta, art, or bona-fide Italians: This trend has nothing to do with the land of “La Dolce Vita” and everything to do with AI-generated chaos, garbled gibberish and digital derangement.Born on TikTok in early 2025, “Italian Brainrot” features bizarre, AI-spawned characters with fake-Italian names and storylines as warped as a Funhouse mirror. Philip Lindsay, a social media creator who calls himself a “student translator,” described Italian Brainrot as “blending AI-images and videos with made-up stories” in a recent video.“If I hear ballerina cappuccino one more time…” threatened one parent in the comments of another recent video by Lindsay.Picture a ballerina with a cappuccino cup for a head (ballerina cappuccina), a crocodile-bomber-plane hybrid (bobardiro crocodilo), and a sneaker-wearing shark chanting his own name (tralaero tralala). The concept behind “Ballerina Cappuccina” was dreamed up in March by 24-year-old Susanu Sava-Tudor in Romania. In an email to the New York Times, Sava-Tudor described the trend as a “form of absurd humor” that’s “less about real Italy and more about the cinematic myth of Italy.” His original video introducing “Ballerina Cappuccina” — which he spelled “Balerinna Cappucinna” — has since garnered over 45 million views and 3.8 million likes on TikTok.The clips come with exaggerated “Italian” voiceovers that sound like a Super Mario fever dream.Oxford even named “brainrot” one of 2024’s words of the year, which should tell you everything you need to know about the current state of humanity.And Gen Alpha can’t get...