Are you up on your emojis? Definitely a question you would never have found yourself asking ten years ago, but nowadays whether to use a Smiling Face or Grinning Face, Clapping Hands or OK Hand, may be something we ask ourselves regularly when we send out messages to friends, work colleagues or business connections.
The word ’emoji’, which comes from the Japanese e (‘picture’) + moji (‘character’), are single-character glyphs created in Japan in the late 1990s, but which only reached a global audience in 2011 when Apple included them in the IOS 5 operating system. Now, there are about 1,900 emojis to choose from and a whole website dedicated to the meaning behind each, known as Emojipedia. But do we know how to use them?
Used in digital communication, the symbols work in a manner similar to non-verbal cues in face-to-face interactions, such as body language, intonation, and facial expressions, and communicate the nuances of mood and emotion between speakers. When emojis appear with text, they often supplement or enhance the writing. 70% of the meaning of an oral conversation comes from non-verbal cues; for example, research has shown that our hands provide important information that often transcends and clarifies the message in speech. Emojis serve this function too – for instance, adding a kissy or winking face can disambiguate whether a statement is flirtatiously teasing or just plain mean.
This is a key point about language use: rarely is natural language ever limited to speech alone. When we are speaking, we constantly use gestures to illustrate what we mean. For this reason, linguists say that language is “multi-modal”. Writing takes away that extra non-verbal information, but emojis may allow us to re-incorporate it into our text.
In recent years, there has been a huge rise in the use of emojis to communicate. Today, more than 90% of social networking users communicate through these symbols and more than six billion emojis are exchanged daily. Each year, the Oxford Dictionary names its “Word of the Year”, noting its prominence or cultural impact over a 12-month period. In 2015, Oxford bestowed its honour not on a word, but an emoji – the face with tears of joy.
With over six billion emojis exchanged every day, the adoption rate of emojis is staggering. So, while we may struggle to communicate verbally in different languages, digital communication with the use of emojis can be very useful: it matters not whether your native tongue is English, Japanese, or French: the smiley face means the same thing in every language.
Researchers believe that the use of emojis is in fact bettering our digital communication. They enhance the interpretation of written text in the absence of gestures and enable communication between individuals of differing languages.