Saudi-born teen punts for digital representation with hijab emoji
WHEN Rayouf Alhumedhi’s friends wanted to identify themselves to one another in a WhatsApp group chat, they didn’t rely on their names. Instead each friend used an emoji.
“My friends, who don’t wear the headscarf, they found something,” Alhumedhi said. “For me? I had to opt to not use an image of a woman wearing a headscarf. Because there isn’t one.”
And so the 15-year-old high school student decided to change that.
The teenager, who lives in Berlin and is originally from Saudi Arabia, is the lead author on a new proposal for a hijab emoji to the Unicode Consortium, the non-profit that governs the creation and approval of emoji.
“I wanted something to represent me, alongside the millions of women who wear the headscarf every day, and pride themselves on wearing the headscarf,” she told me by Skype.
Her proposal, which now has the support of one of Reddit’s co-founders, was promoted on Tuesday in an “Ask me Anything” on the platform.
Particularly for teenagers like Alhumedhi, emoji now are way more than just a fun decoration for digital conversations among friends. They are, increasingly, the conversation themselves.
“It’s the new language,” Alhumedhi said.
As emoji-fluent teenagers become young adults, a new visual literacy is weaving itself into the way we communicate online. The Oxford Dictionary argued as much in 2015 when it made the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji its “word” of the year for 2015.
“Emojis are no longer the preserve of texting teens,” Oxford said at the time. “Instead, they have been embraced as a nuanced form of expression, and one which can cross language barriers.”
Emoji have slowly started to diversify, in response to calls to make the symbols more representative of the people who use them.
Unicode said earlier this year that it would support about a dozen new “professional” emoji that show men and women working in a variety of careers.
“We applaud Unicode for the diversification of emojis in recent years,” Alhumedhi wrote in her proposal draft. “We must be represented.”
But the process of proposing a new emoji is a complicated slog of written proposal, revision and committee meetings. Alhumedhi fired off two quick paragraphs to the consortium on her idea and a member of one of the consortium’s subcommittees reached out to help her get her idea shaped up for formal consideration. Her proposal is now nearly seven pages long and has the backing of Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit.
Her proposal would create a new emoji – the hijab – that could then be paired with a variety of existing human emoji to display that character in hijab. The headscarf proposal is in its final revisions, and it’s aiming for formal consideration in November. If it’s approved, it could be announced as a new emoji as early as mid-2017.