How Emoji Conquered The WorldObservations - Tuesday, 28 July 2015

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A global language for those of us too lazy to talk

It’s a familiar situation – you’re trying to organise a night out but everyone in your WhatsApp group is

coming up with a different place or time to meet. Plus you have a hundred other emails to answer,

notifications are popping up and a meeting’s about to start. Instead of a lengthy reply, you send a � to

one person’s suggestion of dinner. This is the age of constant connection – and distraction. Emails,

Instagram, Skype and Facebook all make it easy to stay in touch with a wide network of friends, yet the

time required to actively maintain these links is often lacking. Enter emoji. Simple, fast and increasingly

ubiquitous, emoji offer an immediate point of communication. Take the dinner confirmation, for

example: you can make yourself clear without typing a single word. This is a widespread phenomenon.

;Emojitracker, a website that shows real-time emoji use on Twitter, gives an insight into their

overwhelming popularity: its tallies of hearts, crying faces and pizza slices reach the millions. Emoji are

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becoming embedded into popular culture, from the full translation of Moby Dick into Emoji Dick toDrake’s praying hands tattoo, and they have even extended into broader societal issues. The success of

the long-standing campaign for greater racial diversity in the emoji spectrum resulted in a major Apple

update in April 2015, signalling a transition from frivolous smileys to a more legitimate mode of

communication.

Instagram, which has used emoji since its launch, recently introduced the use of emoji in hashtags.

According to the company, 40% of all photo captions posted to the platform now contain at least one

emoji, an increase from around 20% in 2012-2013. “It is a rare privilege to observe the rise of a new

language,” says Thomas Dimson, a software engineer on Instagram’s data team, in a company blog post.

“Emoji are becoming a valid and near-universal method of expression in all languages.” The rise of

Instagram itself as a wordless means of expression is indicative of the power of images, and emoji are

able to harness this appeal across multiple mediums.

A 2013 report published on Statista.com on sticker and emoji usage in mobile messaging apps found

that 74% of Americans have used emoji, and 35% use them daily. In China, the figure for daily use rose

to 43%. In Southeast Asia, the popularity of stickers within the LINE instant messaging app is

particularly striking: 560 million people worldwide had registered as members at the beginning of

2015, the majority of them in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. Stickers and smileys could represent a new

era of seamless international communication, overturning barriers of language and dialect. While the

nuances of real emotion may be lacking in and , their simplicity is also a major factor in their

popularity.

While these broad strokes might lead to occasional misunderstandings, Dr Alice G B ter Meulen, a

professor in the department of linguistics at the University of Geneva, notes that this can open up new

possibilities in a conversation. She distinguishes emoji from descriptive text due to their performative

nature – a linguistic term that denotes that truth or falsity cannot be demonstrated. “Emoji can be

interpreted differently by different users and even by two people engaged in a communication,”

explains ter Meulen. “You may send an emoticon with sadness and mean that you regret the last thing

that you typed, but the receiver may understand that you are sad because of something they wrote. So

emoji are ambiguous, but that is so often also useful – purely disambiguated conversations are very

boring.” Emoji offer a new means of demonstrating emotion, layering our communication with visual

signposts.

“Emoji are ambiguous, but that is so often also useful – purely

disambiguated conversations are very boring”

It’s evident that emoji are becoming assimilated into the vocabulary of our lives. Could they in turn

influence not just how we communicate with one another, but how we think? American linguist

Benjamin Lee Whorf developed his theory of linguistic relativity in the 1930s, stating that the structure

of a language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualise the world around them. He proposed

that dramatic differences in vocabulary could influence the way the brain processes information, linking

language with human behaviour.

“As digital communication among the very young becomes more popular, so does the use of emoji,”

says graphic designer Callum Copley, who believes that emoji are having a disruptive effect on language

today. “I think it is plausible that deterioration in the quality of communication could take place, and

people could become over-reliant on emoji to express themselves. Many complex emotions are not

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represented with emoji, and quite possibly never could be.”

Copley plotted a wide spectrum of emoji on a graph, before cross-referencing the results with

psychologist Robert Plutchik’s 1980 wheel of emotions model, which categorises emotions and how

they interact. Copley found the emoji spectrum to be heavily weighted towards basic positive emotions,

with little nuance. “A user growing up with emoji integral to their ability to communicate may end up

only able to express themselves using these melodramatic symbols,” he suggests. “Furthermore,

complicated, abstract feelings may become completely alien and lost forever to some. With so many

people choosing to engage in such a reduced form of dialogue, neglecting to search for richer ways to

express themselves within their native language, a crisis of communication is highly likely.”

The concise nature of emoji might be seen as reductive, but this is also a key aspect of their widespread

appeal. They are highly accessible and easy to digest, as comprehensible for a six-year-old as they are

for a 36-year-old. “I think that it’s a fascinating phenomenon,” writes the Guardian’s design critic Oliver

Wainwright, over Instant Messenger. “Just as Twitter has honed the discipline of reducing ideas and

opinions down to 140 characters, emoji force you to condense your thoughts into a super-limited

vocabulary of tiny pixelated cartoon symbols.” Wainwright then adds a few of his own favourite

emoji:���. Taken up with enthusiasm by teens and adults alike, emoji tap into a sense of fun that is

not defined by age. Often used to add an ironic edge to a message, they have proliferated beyond this

into experimentation that can lead to results that are functional, challenging, or downright weird. New

and surprising combinations of emoji can be used to form rudimentary sentences, expanding the limits

of what they can express.

Emoji are undoubtedly entwined with the language of our times. In a hyperconnected digital age, they

make it easier for us to stay in touch. They are replacing text-speak and acronyms with a newly

condensed mode of representation and communication. Emoji might not be as developed as the written

word, but they open up new possibilities of expression by virtue of their inherent simplicity,

transcending the barriers of language. Rather than the worldwide rise of emoji signalling a crisis of

communication, we might just have found ourselves in an age of renewed connection.

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Words by Louise Benson

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