This article on Longreads entertained me. I have an interest in linguistics but I am no expert.
It is on the growing influence of emojis as language, rather than just decoration. It is light hearted, and not backed by science - rather a set of anecdotal examples of emoji evolving into a proto-language.
We are quite limited here on Discourse to give examples, but I’d be interested to hear from @Johanna and @Pardel-Lux who are actual linguists on how they view our pictograph overlords.
For myself, I rarely use them, but I did find the article a quite interesting view into a generation who have always had emoticons - ad not just the ASCII versions that I learned back in '99
There have been full-length novels published in emoji, but perhaps not yet that many and by enough different authors to comprehensively study the language and compare it to other pictographic writing systems? The interesting thing is that it is not supposed to be a written form of an existing language (except perhaps sometimes it is?)
I have read Book from the Ground, but not Emoji Dick.
I think this is why The Emoji Movie was such a monumental disaster. The studio execs doubtless thought “These emoji things are really popular with the youth; a movie based on them is a sure success!”. But they’re popular in the same way that words are. Nobody would ever think “Let’s make a movie based on words”.
I am not really a linguist, just an interpreter. My theoretical underpinning is shallow, but I have a lot of practical experience. As has anyone who speaks any language and thinks about it ocasionally. But I have an opinion, and if my 2 cent are asked for, I will share what I think.
No, emoji is not a language. Just as Egyptian hieroglyphs are not a language. The language is Egyptian, and how it is written does not make a different language. Hieroglyphs could surely be transcribed in our alphabet, or the Arab script, and it would still be Egyptian. The Turkish alphabet reform imposed exactly this kind of change from the Arab script to the Latin script in 1928, but Turkish remained the same language. Would analphabets even have noticed? (Probably yes, but the argument still stands)
On top of that I miss grammar, syntax and phonetics in emoji. Semantics is hazy, to say the least. I see no verbs, quantifiers or adjectives, no adverbs nor prepositions.
Emojis complement existing languages, open new ways of expressing certain things (like: “don’t take what I just wrote too seriously, it is not meant to offend!” or simply: ). They have their uses and their place. But that does not a language make.
It is complicated. Programming languages like Python (a rare case, although there are other esoteric languages that support emojis) can handle emojis as variables in unicode format, and IDEs can then display the emoji rather than the raw unicode.
I mean, obviously, the raw code is the binary source so the compiler doesnt care, but visually…
They’re essentially like a type of punctuation mark with a wider range of semantic weight/meaning. It’s not a language in and of itself so far as I can see.
Pardel-Lux is right that it isn’t a language; it’s a writing system. Mr. Dibble is right that it’s a matter of semiotics rather than linguistics. I disagree with pulykamell because it’s something much more than punctuation.
It’s pictographic writing and it brings the same advantages and disadvantages as other pictographic systems. It may not come supplied with syntax, but I can guarantee you once it becomes used for writing connected texts, the syntax will appear, because syntax is how we make language structures, the way that covalent bonds make molecular structures.
Compare the Naxi writing system. It’s capable of connected syntactic running text in pictures, which encodes the Naxi language and the Naxi text can be read back by someone who knows the pictographic system. Note that it’s difficult to write in all pictograms, and in practice Naxi writers supplement it with phonetic syllabic characters to resolve ambiguity.
Naxi displays both the usefulness and the weakness of writing in pictographics, and emoji writing is evolving similarly.
Actually, that’s interesting. Maybe the early ASCII emoticons were more like more involved punctuation and have evolved? Or would you consider those pictographic writing, as well?
The engaging book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language has a chapter on emojis. The bit I remember most is that the author was asked to to a presentation on emojis, and her first thought was to do the presentation entirely in emojis–but in trying to meet this challenge, she realized how different emojis are from a real language. It’s been awhile since I read it, but I think her conclusion was that emojis are less like words and more like gestures.
Here’s the transcript of a podcast she did on the subject. Being a transcript, it’s a lot less coherent than the book was, but it’ll give some of the ideas. (Edit: if you want to get into the meat of the discussion, search for the phrase “A lot of times, when we think about having a body online” and start there).
Think about this, though. You can give me an emoji for happy, or sad, or balloon, or confusion, or pizza. But can you give me an emoji that means “might have been”? Can you give me an emoji sentence that means “Attached is your Drivers License, ID card or Learner Permit; please review the attached card for correctness” (the first sentence I saw, looking around my desk)? Can you translate this paragraph into emojis such that a reader could understand it?
There are a lot of things that emojis do really well. But language can do a lot of things that emojis can’t do.
I would say that emojis aren’t a system of writing, but that they are a part of a system of writing. Translating a text entirely into emojis is difficult, but translating a text containing emojis entirely into text without them is also difficult.
I would expect that the typical behavior for a programming language would be to have some overall alphabet of characters that are recognized at all, and then within that overall alphabet, have some short list of characters that are special characters, and any valid character that isn’t a special character is then valid for use in names of variables, functions, or other programmer-created objects. Many programming languages are old enough that the total recognized alphabet is only ASCII, but I would expect newer languages to use Unicode, and if you’re using Unicode, then it would follow naturally that almost all Unicode characters (including emojis) would be valid in names.
Emoticons are pictographs too. Just because the graphic raw material for assembling them comes from punctuation marks doesn’t make them function as punctuation. Rather, they function as grammatical sentence tags.
In this, they fit right in with Cantonese syntax, which has a supply of sentence tags for every occasion. The Malay language has just one sentence tag used all the time: lah, which means ‘everything’s cool, brah, we’re all friends here’, in addition to the interrogative tag kah that makes a sentence into a question.
The interesting tidbit I have to share about this is that emoji and emoticon do not share an etymology, as one might think. Emoticon is “emotion(al)+icon,” but emoji come from Japanese for “picture+character,” or e+moji.
In one sense, yes; in another sense, they can skip the words altogether to encode meaning directly.
For example, when I posted a quote from “Instant Karma” (Well, we all shine on / like the moon and the stars and the sun), I gave the attribution in emojis: eyeglasses, electric guitar, and Union Jack spell “John Lennon” to those in the know (they could equally well stand for Elvis Costello, which shows that they convey ideas rather than words).
An emoji can be used to substitute for a word in running text. But it really encodes ideas. It functions as an ideogram. Contrast this with Chinese characters, which encode words as words. Chinese characters are logograms, not ideograms. Leibniz totally got that wrong. Emojis are the real ideograms.
). They have their uses and their place. But that does not a language make.