COULD EMOJIS BE THE WORLD’S FIRST UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE?

They convey emotion, action, name, place, animal and thing. As language takes a pictorial turn, see how emojis are shaping communication and why we’re fussing over a few pixels

Ihaven’t been on a Ferris wheel in years. But I sent out eight Ferris wheel emojis last week – my personal shorthand for everyday joy. Online order arrived: . Canteen has medu wadas: . Socks dried despite the rain: .

Emojis are in their 20th year (they were born in Japan in 1999). Emoticons, their punctuation-based precursors, are in their 36th. Both have cut across continents, devices, situations and cultures to change the way we communicate. Some 92% of online users use emoji now. Did you send out a today? Maybe you added a to decorate your “Hello”. Used to mean ‘airhead’. Called on to sprinkle in some sass. Or found to be warmer than a hug emoji.

Emojis are replacing the LOL-type abbreviations of the previous wired generation. Teachers are adding them to exam grades. They’re in movie promos, in tweets by national leaders, in feedback forms, on cushions. Many believe this ever-growing set of symbols is becoming the world’s first universal language.

How do you feel about it: or ?

STARTING TO SMILE

It started innocuously enough, in September 1982. Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, proposed the use of :-) and :-( to mark posts that were made in jest, and the emoticon was born.

We’d all have cricks in our necks if it wasn’t for Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita. In 1999, he created 176 basic symbols for the telecom company Docomo. he took cues from manga, street signs and Chinese characters to render pixelated, colourful, cross-stitch-like designs on a 12x12 grid. It was intended to help cellphone users say more within the 250-character texting limit.

The cutesy shortcuts became so popular, platforms around the world (BlackBerry, MSN Messenger, GChat and the like) developed their own icons over the 2000s. So a smiley sent from an iPhone would read as a blank square on Gmail. It wasn’t until 2010 that the Unicode Consortium, which sets compatibility standards across platforms, worked out codes for the first 722 icons on iPhone and Android. And the party really started.

As of June 2018, Unicode recognises 2,823 emojis. The face icons now come in several skin tones; there are fairies, falafels, female detectives and factories. You can say cheers on WhatsApp, raise your hands in #MeToo solidarity on Twitter, respond to an Instagram story with , or get an airplane seat on Outlook Mail. The most popular, though, are hearts, smileys and hand gestures.

There’s a growing sense that given enough emojis, language could become redundant. Nothing could be further from the truth, say language experts.

SIGN OF THE TIMES

Emojis aren’t language. They lack the tenses, prepositions, syntax and activepassive voice essential for complex communication. What they are is a sort of universal expansion pack for all languages, as Gretchen McCulloch puts it. The Canadian linguist is working on a book in defence of internet language. She thinks emojis are“gestures that accompany words but are not effective independently”. “Like using hand signs in a foreign country, you’ll get by, but you won’t get far.” When emojis combine with words, they give context to text. This is useful online, when you can’t see, hear or gauge sentiment. “Research by Owen Churches of Flinders University, Adelaide, identified that emoji faces are interpreted by our brain in the same way as real faces,” says Jurga Zilinskiene, CEO and founder of Today Translations. “This explains their value.” Her UK firm pioneered emoji interpretation services.

Our born-of-the-web expansion pack is not without its bugs. Kurita’s original emojis descended from Japanese anime, which, McCulloch says, focus on the eyes, not the mouth. “The happy face had an ^^ eyes and an O mouth. The crying one had the same O mouth, but TT eyes as tears,” she says. Western users, used to curvedup smiles and curved-down frowns, didn’t understand the expressions.

“The Tears of Joy emoji, the Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2015, is often misinterpreted as tears of sadness,” says Zilinskiene.

For gestures, it’s a straight-up .In China, isn’t hello or bye. It’s a rude dismissal, like giving the finger. Zilinskiene says is offensive in central Asia. But because it means ‘like’ on Facebook, “it’s standardising the positive interpretation of the gesture around the world”.

Like slang, symbols play double roles. is now code for a dying phone. In Japan the word ‘poo’ is similar to ‘luck’, So poo emojis fly across phones at exam time.

Alt-right groups and white nationalists now identify with the Glass of Milk emoji. When the Chinese social-media platform Weibo blocked the #MeToo protest hashtag, women switched to and emojis. Why? The local words for rice and bunny are pronounced ‘mi’ and ‘tu’.

FAMILIAR FACES

There’s plenty of politics in the world of emojis, often based on similar issues of identity, race, gender and prejudice.

Where the public has rallied to include same-sex and single-parent family emojis in the West, there have been campaigns in Arab nations to ban them, and introduce polygamous family emojis. Until recently, the Taiwan flag emoji read as an invalid input on iPhones registered in China.

McCulloch says emojis spark spirited reactions because they are out of our control. “I can write a new word with existing letters in my language, but I can’t create an emoji,” she says.

Parikshit Deshmukh went a different way. In 2015, the user experience designer conceptualised 10 Indian stereotype emojis as a project at IIT-Guwahati. Among them, an auntiji, a daakuji and a netaji. “There’s more impact when you localise,” he says. “The secret to designing them is to respect the pixel limit and palette.”

SIGNS OF TOMORROW

Widespread, rapid, confusing emoji use has prompted Zilinskiene at Today Translations to create a hitherto non-existent post: emoji translator. They hired Keith Broni last year — an Irishman with an IT and business psychology background who’d completed a dissertation about emojis. He now consults on international digital marketing campaigns.

In the future, there are likely to be more emojis representing different cultures. Perhaps, McCulloch suggests, the digital world will eventually come up with a way to bypass Unicode and create our own emojis. Will you or ?