Emoji, a nothing language!

The 3,600+ emoji characters that make human connection impossible!

Behind the curtains

What appears to be an international visual language, is in fact decided by a small group from the US tech industry.

Like all other digital alphabets, emoji are governed by the non-profit Unicode consortium, which is based in the US. Adding new emoji is voted on by members of the consortium. Its full members communicate in English, and the majority are employees of Adobe, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Yahoo.

Their privilege may be reflected in the lack of emoji for illness, poverty, hunger, and war. Keith Spencer points out in an article titled "The neoliberal politics of emoji," that emoji has plenty of options for food, objects, and products: "…they perfectly resemble the market economy that created them, and which has turned everything it can into a commodity. The market has come at last to commodify our feelings."

Language?

Humans communicate to one another using language, whether that is verbal, manual (signed), or written. The key objective of language is to transmit information from one person to another.

Prominent internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch put it nicely, saying: “language is a fluid ‘open-source project.’ It is an ever-evolving construct that works when a message sender successfully communicates information to the receiver."

With this in mind, you might be tempted to make the argument that Emojis are a new visual form of language. After all they can convey emotions and concepts in a visual form just like text, not to mention they are almost always used in conjunction with written language. But there are several reasons that exclude Emojis from gaining the status of being a language.

Mainly that Emojis, unlike other languages, do not follow grammatical rules. There is no standardized method of using Emojis. There are trends online, where Emojis such as the 🍆, 🍑, 🅱️, and others have obtained a wide accepted alternate meaning. But these examples fall far too short of the complexity and precision of traditional written languages. In certain small groups and communities there are “rules” to when these should be used, but they’re at best inside jokes of sorts. Not adding much of anything in ways of communicating new ideas.

While traditional languages have to some extent been standardized and rules have been created to dictate how to properly utilize them. In reality, and in practice the standardization must follow the language. When a new word is invented, as long as enough people begin using it, the semantics will follow and catalogue it as official.

Emojis works in stark contrast to this, in practically the opposite way. While ordinary people have the opportunity to make their own Emojis, it is tech giants that have the final say in dictating what does and doesn’t get accepted.

What is it then?

As a visual communications method that is so simplified in comparison to traditional forms of language, Emojis can only really serve as additions to text. Alone they are next to incomprehensible.

Before Emojis, it was hard to communicate sarcasm or irony through plain text. There was the exclamation mark to allude to excitement and various other kinds of punctuation to add nuance to written text, but it wasn’t as clear as most would want.

In real face to face communications spoken language is far more than just verbal. People gesticulate with their hands, incorporate their body with exaggerated movements, and articulate what they are saying with facial expressions. These all add to their spoken word to deepen their meaning and better communicate their intended ideas.

As not a full-fledged language, but instead a colorful and expressive addition to written language which adds slight hints of intended meaning, Emojis are quite successful.

Emoji, a global language!

The 3,600+ emoji characters that make human connection possible.

Introduction

Emojis, which infuse flat text with personality, are everywhere. More than 900 million emojis (without text) are sent on Facebook messenger every day. Half of Instagram comments contain emojis. On Twitter, the most used emoji is 😂 Face With Tears of Joy, and one in five Tweets contains an emoji, up from one in 10 in 2014, according to Emojipedia.

However, emojis aren’t just a part of our social media lexicon. They’ve gone mainstream. The White House Council of Economic Advisors, for instance, released a report about millennial debt and education, sprinkling emojis throughout the report. In Slack, remote workforces are adding custom emojis to their conversations to help personalize communication in a dispersed environment.

Further proving that emojis have successfully embedded themselves in pop culture is the fact that they have their very own day. Mark your calendars (preferably with the emoji that has a party hat and horn): July 17 is World Emoji Day. The reason? July 17 is the date that’s famously displayed on the 📅 Calendar Emoji. (By the way, it’s not random. July 17 was the date that iCal for Mac was first announced at MacWorld Expo in 2002).

Ahead of July 17, you can vote on the “most anticipated emoji” and the “most 2021 emoji.” Find out more information here.

Here, a look at how emojis emerged and how they’re evolving, plus some fun facts about these pictograms.

History

Really, the concept of emojis isn’t all that new as cultures have used different forms of pictograms as a part of human expression for centuries. The ancient Egyptians, for example, used hieroglyphics to record their stories and history.

The modern-day emoji can be loosely traced back to chatrooms in the 1990s, when primitive emojis were used in conversations, like : ) to signal a smile or ; ) to punctuate a joke or sarcastic jab.

But designer Shigetaka Kurita is considered to be the founding father of today’s emojis. In 1999, NTT DOCOMO, a Japanese cell phone company, released a set of 176 emojis for mobile phones and pagers. Emoji is the blend of two Japanese words: picture and letter. (It's a mere coincidence that “emoji” sounds like it was derived from the English word “emotion). Kurita used Japanese graphic novels and Zapf Dingbats typeface as well as illustrations and pictograms to create the first emoji library. The pixelated designs that ultimately gave way to today’s expansive emoji database are on display at the Museum of Modern Art.

In 2015, and for the first time ever, Oxford dictionary deemed an emoji its “Word of the Year.” The “Face with Tears of Joy” 😂 emoji earned the title because it was the most frequently used emoji worldwide. In general, the dictionary noted, the word emoji saw a large increase in use that year.

Today, more than 3,000 emojis exist, including 117 new emojis that were introduced in 2020. Some of the newest arrivals include a toothbrush, green bell pepper, people hugging, bubble tea, Transgender flag, a black cat, and more

Today

Already, many companies in the tech space have dispersed workforces. But at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many more workforces went remote—not knowing when (or if) they’d return to the office.

Helping ease the transition were emojis.

With the absence of face-to-face interactions, emojis help lighten the conversations on virtual platforms like Slack, says Brad Touesnard, founder of SpinupWP, a modern cloud-based server control panel designed for WordPress.

“Written messages can come across as cold and abrupt,” Touesnard says. “To counteract this we encourage the use of emojis to let people express their personality and humor.”

Over time, his team, which is fully remote, has developed their own custom emojis based around company culture and inside jokes.

Research backs the idea that emojis can help build camaraderie. If you get a warm feeling when you see a smiley emoticon it could be linked to the fact that our brains process emojis in a similar way that we process human faces, according to research. Also, eight of 10 people surveyed for Adobe’s 2019 Emoji Trend Report believe that emoji users are more friendly and approachable.

You can also track the real time usage of Emojis on Twitter at Emojistats.

Tomorrow

So, what’s next for emojis?

Software engineers and developers have been working to make the database of emojis more inclusive. The iOS 14.5 added new emojis in 2021, with mixed skin tone support for variations of the kissing couple emoji and the couples with a heart emoji. Up until now, they had been available in a default Simpson yellow on most major platforms.

Also, you can now create your very own emoji. Imoji is a free app for iOS and Android that can morph any picture into a custom emoji that you can share with your friends.

If you want to submit your Emoji to someday be added to the growing collection of official Emojis, accessible, viewable, and usable by every device on the market. Follow these guidelines for submitting a proposal to the Unicode consortium. Once submitted, the Emoji Subcommittee at Unicode will decide whether your submission fulfills the criteria laid out within the guidelines. Upon approval the proposal is sent forward to the Unicode Technical Committee, here a vote is held to decide whether the new proposed Emoji deserves a spot as an official Emoji. If the proposal is accepted, it is then sent forth to the main Emoji providers to be rendered in accordance with their own style guides. And just like that, with the next update to your software you will be able to find your Emoji along with the rest in the Emoji keyboard!

New emojis

The newest Emojis added on the 17th of March with the iOS 15.4 update:

Emoji, a nothing language!

The 3,600+ emoji characters that make human connection impossible!

Behind the curtains

What appears to be an international visual language, is in fact decided by a small group from the US tech industry.

Like all other digital alphabets, emoji are governed by the non-profit Unicode consortium, which is based in the US. Adding new emoji is voted on by members of the consortium. Its full members communicate in English, and the majority are employees of Adobe, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Yahoo.

Their privilege may be reflected in the lack of emoji for illness, poverty, hunger, and war. Keith Spencer points out in an article titled "The neoliberal politics of emoji," that emoji has plenty of options for food, objects, and products: "…they perfectly resemble the market economy that created them, and which has turned everything it can into a commodity. The market has come at last to commodify our feelings."

Language?

Humans communicate to one another using language, whether that is verbal, manual (signed), or written. The key objective of language is to transmit information from one person to another.

Prominent internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch put it nicely, saying: “language is a fluid ‘open-source project.’ It is an ever-evolving construct that works when a message sender successfully communicates information to the receiver."

With this in mind, you might be tempted to make the argument that Emojis are a new visual form of language. After all they can convey emotions and concepts in a visual form just like text, not to mention they are almost always used in conjunction with written language. But there are several reasons that exclude Emojis from gaining the status of being a language.

Mainly that Emojis, unlike other languages, do not follow grammatical rules. There is no standardized method of using Emojis. There are trends online, where Emojis such as the 🍆, 🍑, 🅱️, and others have obtained a wide accepted alternate meaning. But these examples fall far too short of the complexity and precision of traditional written languages. In certain small groups and communities there are “rules” to when these should be used, but they’re at best inside jokes of sorts. Not adding much of anything in ways of communicating new ideas.

While traditional languages have to some extent been standardized and rules have been created to dictate how to properly utilize them. In reality, and in practice the standardization must follow the language. When a new word is invented, as long as enough people begin using it, the semantics will follow and catalogue it as official.

Emojis works in stark contrast to this, in practically the opposite way. While ordinary people have the opportunity to make their own Emojis, it is tech giants that have the final say in dictating what does and doesn’t get accepted.

What is it then?

As a visual communications method that is so simplified in comparison to traditional forms of language, Emojis can only really serve as additions to text. Alone they are next to incomprehensible.

Before Emojis, it was hard to communicate sarcasm or irony through plain text. There was the exclamation mark to allude to excitement and various other kinds of punctuation to add nuance to written text, but it wasn’t as clear as most would want.

In real face to face communications spoken language is far more than just verbal. People gesticulate with their hands, incorporate their body with exaggerated movements, and articulate what they are saying with facial expressions. These all add to their spoken word to deepen their meaning and better communicate their intended ideas.

As not a full-fledged language, but instead a colorful and expressive addition to written language which adds slight hints of intended meaning, Emojis are quite successful.