How new emojis find their way onto your phone

Unicode Consortium to vote on the next set of 67 symbols to be part of quasi-language

An obscure organization that standardizes the way punctuation marks and other text are represented by computer systems has in recent years found itself at the forefront of mobile pop culture, with its power to create new emojis.

A new batch is under review, a process that takes months. But don’t call the pictorial system a language, unless you want an argument from Mark Davis, 63, co-founder and president of the Unicode Consortium, the group that serves as the midwife to new emojis.

Davis said there was no broadly shared way to interpret the symbols, despite their widespread use on phones and other devices.

“I can tell you, using language, I need to go get a haircut, but only if I can get there by 3 p.m., and otherwise I have to pick up the kids,” he said. “You try to express that in emoji and you get a series of symbols that peo- ple could interpret in a thousand different ways.”

In an interview last week, Davis discussed the latest group of 67 images, set for a vote at the consortium’s meeting next spring.

The pictures include a groom in a tuxedo (there is already a bride), a Mother Christmas figure (a counterpart to the existing Santa Claus), a pregnant woman, a drooling face, a clown, a shark, an avocado and two strips of bacon.

The Unicode Consortium is sometimes labelled “mysterious” (as in a recent post from New York maga- zine) but Davis said there was nothing shadowy about it. Its work is largely transparent, and information about its history, members and processes are included on its website.

The group includes executives from Apple, Google, Facebook and other technology giants. Davis is chief internationalization architect at Google. The group meets quarterly; at a meeting in May, they will vote on whether to formally induct the 67 new emojis.

Unicode was started in the late 1980s to develop a standardized code for text characters. It used to be that different computers could not easily talk to one another because they used different codes for the same letters.

To solve that problem, Unicode takes every letter, number, symbol and punctuation mark that it deems worthy and assigns each — including emojis — a specific number that a computer will recognize.

Some of these modern hieroglyphics have prompted debate. Sets of default emojis that included only white skin tones prompted Unicode to release more diverse characters last year.