ARE YOU EMOTIPRO OR EMOTICON?
Is emoji the new global language? The tsunami of emoji – which is Japanese for picture character – engulfed the world in 2011 and never receded. More than 6 billion emoji are sent every day and emojionly texts have become so common worldwide that the Oxford English Dictionary named the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji their word of the year in 2015.
This triggered a debate. Is emoji a dumbing down of language? Are emoji even words? Are they making people lazy? Or are they the world’s first truly global language?
Cognitive linguistics and communication expert Vyvyan Evans draws on linguistics, psychology, neuroscience and anthropology to explore the evolution of communication and how it will evolve rapidly as we juggle communicating in the real and digital world.
“Far from being a passing fad, Emoji reflects, and thereby reveals, fundamental elements of communication; and in turn, this all shines a light on what it means to be human,” he writes, in The Emoji Code.
Like most things humans, emoji evolve and change, often in unexpected ways. Some come to mean something completely different from what they were meant to symbolise.
Take the peach emoji, whose unfortunate resemblance to a peachy butt has made it the most popular symbol for butt across continents and languages — so much so that when Apple released a new design for the peach emoji that looked more like a fruit, users objected and Apple withdrew the update.
The eggplant, meanwhile, is emoji-slang for the penis, which prompted Instagram to exclude it from its emoji hashtag list because it feared it would be attached to images containing nudity. The cherry emoji means what you think it does, so we don’t need to go there.
As with any language, there are wide cultural variations. In Japan, the bank emoji is commonly used to imply skipping work, because the letters BK are short for the Japanese word bakkureru, or slacker.
Does this make Emoji a new language? Not quite, says Evans. It has no grammar and cannot be combined with complex words and phrases. But it’s now so recognised as a tool of communication that it “can and will be used in a court of law against you”.