What does your emoji usage reveal about you and your age?
If you are a Generation Xer, someone in their fifties and above, then the chances are that you may have recently deployed the praying hands emoji when sending a text. For this generation, it’s usually a shorthand for ‘please’, or ‘let’s hope so.’
Alas, if you’ve sent it to a Gen Zer, someone in their twenties, they might just take it the wrong way: for the younger cohort, it’s sometimes used to signal that they find someone attractive, or more precisely: “hot”.
But then that’s language for you. Always changing and evolving, it takes on different forms and significance over periods of time, for different people, in different geographical regions.
And emojis – those multiple, funny little picture symbols on our smartphones are a type of “language”, or more specifically a ‘paralanguage’, meaning something that accompanies the words we use to help us communicate more effectively. Because surprising as it may seem to some, when we talk to each other, only around 30 percent of the way we communicate comes from the actual words we say out loud. The rest comes from intonation, facial expressions, gestures and prosody—which means the rhythmic patterns of our speech.
Emojis function in the same way, helping us to communicate more efficiently when we send those emails and text messages. In effect, they’re the body language of the digital age.
Although, that wasn’t the purpose for which they were initially created. Emojis – the word is Japanese in origin, and comes from a blend of two words, ‘e’ for picture and ‘moji’ for character - were initially invented as a kind of shorthand system for the earliest version of what we now call a smartphone.
Emojis were the brainchild of a software developer called Shigetaka Kurita, who helped to launch the first commercially available smartphone internet system back in 1999, in Japan.
Given the limitations of those rudimentary phone displays - many of us will remember the limited function of those giant brick-like phones back then – Kurita wanted a way to depict simple universal concepts from weather, to moods, and foods to help limit the number of words needed on the screen display. He created 176 picture characters which are now widely accepted as the first ever emojis, although those relatively simplistic computer sketches are almost unrecognizable when set against the the yellow smileys we use today.
Those came into being a few years later, when the Unicode Consortium, based in California, started to take a look at them. Until then, Unicode had been busy setting the universal standards for fonts displayed on computers across all manufacturers – but now they did the same for emojis. They took those initial 176 symbols created by Kurita, compressed them into the small yellow faces which are so familiar to us today, and added some more.
They would be the first of many: today we have many thousands of emojis available on our home screens, all rubberstamped by Unicode, which deploys a rigorous eighteen month vetting process before approving a new ‘release.’ They have strict rules. No overtly religious emojis of deities or living people, and nothing that could be seen to promote violence. So no Jesus, and no rifles.
It wasn’t until 2011 onwards though that emojis became widely deployed. That was the year the software giant Apple adopted them on their iPhones, followed over the next couple of years by all the different android operating systems. By 2015, such was the global reach of the emoji that Oxford English Dictionaries proclaimed the Laughing with Tears of Joy emoji their “word” of the year (provoking shock and outrage among the “grammar police”).
That same year, as part of the research for my book The Emoji Code, I undertook a survey of 2000 adults 18-65 about their use of emojis, and found that the majority of over forties lacked confidence when it came to using this form of visual communication, lagging way behind 18-25 years olds, who were already using them freely.How things have changed in the last near decade: today, the older generation are equally keen deployers of emojis - although as I’ve touched on, the way we use them, and equally pertinently what we think they mean, can differ from one generation to another. So, for example, when Gen Millennials (those born between 1981-1996 post the exploding head emoji, they mean it literally to depict the fact their mind is blown.
Gen Zers (the ones who came after them) use it in more sarcastic fashion, as the pictorial equivalent of ‘you don’t say.’
Fascinating isn’t it? And as we’ll see below, there are plenty more examples of this linguistic sub-culture – and no doubt many more in years to come.
Some of my previous articles on Emoji are below:
How Language Like is Emoji?: https://blog.oup.com/2016/04/how-language-like-is-emoji/
Coronavirus Emojis: Conveying Compassion and Humour With a Facemask: https://thewire.in/culture/coronavirus-emojis-conveying-compassion-and-humour-with-a-facemask
Breaking the Emoji Code: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/breaking-emoji-code-vyv-evans/
Emojis actually make our language better: https://nypost.com/2017/08/12/emojis-actually-make-our-language-way-better/
Why you need Emoji: https://nautil.us/why-you-need-emoji-236672/
The power of the emoji, Japan’s most transformative modern design: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/29/design/emoji-digital-language/
Signs of our times: why emoji can be even more powerful than words: https://theconversation.com/signs-of-our-times-why-emoji-can-be-even-more-powerful-than-words-50893
Are Emojis Becoming the New Universal 'Language'?: https://www.newsweek.com/are-emojis-becoming-new-universal-language-333213
(A version of this article was originally commissioned by UK newspaper, The Daily Mail)