Emoji and the Future of Language

Emoji have been with us since the beginning. Before Claude Shannon dreamed up digital logic in 1937, people sent postcards to each other, chock full of cartoons, faces, and sketches. Or going back a few millennia, Mayans used representational images as part of their script, as did 3200 BCE Egyptians in their hieroglyphs.

Ideographic writing systems like hieroglyphs (where graphic symbols stand in for ideas) arose far before glyph-based writing systems like the Latin alphabet (where abstract symbols stand in for words). When humans made the jump from spoken to written word, they started with ideograms, not glyphs.

The years from 1967, when the first computer-based text editor was used, to 1982, when the first emoticon was sent, were a dark age for representational images. Rather than the norm, this emoji-less night is an anomoly in the history of the written word. Although it was only in 2011 that we could represent :) as 🙂 via smartphone! (Yes, gen Z-ers already have a sob story.)

Bound up as they are with human language faculties, emoji — or some variation thereof — will not go extinct anytime soon. Contrary to the gloomy predictions of some pundits, emoji adoption is widespread across cultures and increases annually — 92% of all people online, as of the last count. As goes emoji, so goes language.

What confusion the framers of the constitution could have avoided with a few emoji in the right places!

These detractors also ignore the recent history of ‘semantic multipliers’ in text. Before 400 BCE there was no period. The exclamation mark took until the 15th century to appear. And the sentence-opening question mark ¿ only made its way into Spanish in 1754, though not yet into any other language.

And let’s not forget the emotionally salient uses of our latest semantic multiplier: 😅 to emote nervousness, 😘 to show a lover how you feel (how stuffy “I love you” reads in comparison). Gen Z-ers even report that certain of them have bridged the gap from text to speech: “that Becky IRL? Vomit face emoji”.

In fact, a vomit face is more significant than it might first appear. Ideograms like it are a potent corrective as the world transitions from the analogue to the digital. Time was, writing carried meta-textual meaning: handwriting, heck even stylus imprints, said something about your mood and urgency, your personality. Renaissance typesetters could convey intent through custom typefacing, kerning, alignment. Even morse code operators had a distinctive “hand” (a fact that was put to good use during WWII). It seemed that our late convergence on the same digital messaging tools had standardized and sanitized our writing, stripping away what remained of non-verbal queues — until the emoji came around, that is.

Of course, there are many things to lament about the latest developments in the emoji-verse. Or even before that, their original sin: Apple, Google, etc. coming up with rival depictions for each emoji, condemning us to a world where we must live in fear of an OS re-rendering our message and distorting our intent.

More recently, there’s the yearly release of new emoji by the Unicode Consortium. This tsunami of symbols is disastrous for ease of use (it takes forever to find a simple smiley) and even worse in terms of how it betrays the point of ideograms: they’re symbols, not pictures. Just as the abstraction of words freed us from having to paint everything we wanted to record, so emoji free us from having to write out everything we want to convey.

To wit, abstraction > representation and efficiency > exhaustiveness.

To the latter point, the designer Shigetaka Kurita created the first textable emoji, a brilliant but meager set of 176. This set — now part of MoMA’s permanent collection — omitted race and gender, but did include disability, confusion, and sparkle. Kurita’s economy has since been replaced by an insatiable desire for more: there are emoji for five skin shades (when LEGO yellow was arguably a less problematic abstraction) and symbols for such commonplaces as 🥌 and 🚏. The set now numbers 3,053.

The Consortium’s fashionable anti-abstraction agenda has led to all sorts of curiosities. Before scrolling to the place where “White Man with Brown Hair” emoji might exist (it doesn’t lol) I’ll encounter “Cat Face With Wry Smile” and “Japanese Ogre”. And getting pride of place in my iOS emoji library, before even faces and hands, is a stable of cussing unicorns.

Setting aside the questions of racism, sexism, cultural erasure, and rampant chaff, the ideology being smuggled in under the guise of ‘yearly unicode update’ merits examination. A gun being replaced by a water pistol is a case in point. Believe what you will about guns, they’re a defining feature of life around the world, and in the US especially. Should we always whistle past the graveyard?

Or slice it a different way. There are dozens of Japanese character emoji, which by all accounts are barely used by Japanese speakers. Never mind China with its 1.3 billion speakers. English does get a nod — 🆒, 🔤 — which, apart from being useless, completely miss the point. Note to Unicode Consortium: symbols ≠ words.

Related posts:

Last night as I was laying in a cheap Seattle hotel room, I was a ball of restless nerves. After a tiring day of flying across the country, all flights to Vancouver Island had been canceled — thanks…

As a member of the Post Ego Movement, I was introduced to a scientifically proven practice called the braingasm. Here’s the background: Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital recently…

Through the selection process at Andela, there is the time I’ve been waiting for since I read many articles from their website and many others and it was often described as amazing and vigorous…