Emojis transcend linguistic boundaries
Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year is a little electronic image
Do words ever escape you? Then this one’s for you.
Last week, the Oxford Dictionaries chose its Word of the Year for 2015: “Face with Tears of Joy.” Citing a swell in emoji culture over the last year, Oxford Dictionaries and the London-based Swiftkey, a company that develops keyboard apps for smartphones, undertook research to see which images were being most frequently used. They found that “Face with Tears of Joy” — a yellow, saucer-shaped face with an open smile and tears of laughter spurting out of its eyes — totalled 20 per cent of all emoji use in the United Kingdom and 17 per cent in the United States.
Emoji, for the uninitiated, are small digital images used in electronic communication. They are designed to express a feeling, idea or emotion. A man named Shigetaka Kurita who worked for a telecom company called NTT DoCoMo originally developed them in Japan during the late 1990s. The word “emoji” is derived from a combination of the Japanese terms “e,” meaning picture, and “moji,” meaning word. Today, these small images take on hundreds of shapes. You can find pictures of sushi rolls and burritos, hands clapping and clasped in prayer, sad and happy faces, hearts, cigarettes, wine glasses and high-heeled shoes. They can be beamed all over the world by all kinds of people who may not speak the same language, but can express complex ideas with a shared use of a simple image.
It has been noted that the 2015 Word of the Year selection follows a recent trend from Oxford Dictionaries in highlighting “words” that are associated with tech culture. For example, the U.S. Word of the Year in 2012 was “GIF” and 2013’s Word of the Year was “selfie.”
The “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji beat out a bunch of other contenders on the shortlist this year. Some of those include Ad blocker (“a piece of software designed to prevent advertisements from appearing on a web page”), On Fleek (“extremely good, attractive, or stylish” — a term popularized in 2014 by a woman named Kayla Newman as she referred to her eyebrows in a short online video known as a Vine), Brexit (“A term for the potential or hypothetical departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union”), sharing economy (“An economic system in which assets or services are shared between private individuals either for free or for a fee, typically by means of the Internet” — think Airbnb or Uber) and lumbersexual (“a young urban man who cultivates an appearance and style of dress typified by a beard and check shirt suggestive of a rugged outdoor lifestyle.” I will take the opportunity to note that this man can typically be found in any café in my Montreal Mile End neighbourhood).
Languages are always evolving and adapting to the needs of their users. The President of Oxford Dictionaries Casper Grathwohl issued a statement saying: “You can see how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapidfire, visually focused demands of 21st century communication. … It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps — it’s flexible, immediate, and infuses tone beautifully. As a result, emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders.”
In other words (or pictures, as the case may be), emojis are a trend pointing us toward a changing language in a changing society.
At the same time, it is important to point out that most people in the world still have no access to the new communication technologies — smartphones, tablets, computers — that offer these new linguistic shortcuts. This is why in a strange way these little electronic images may already be emerging as a language of the global elite.
I wonder if there is an emoji for that.