# Linguistics: emoji as language **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [July 3, 2025, 12:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440 "2025-07-03T12:09:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2025, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/21 "2025-07-03T18:05:06Z")
Does this mean that emojis comprise an argot? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2025, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/22 "2025-07-03T18:20:51Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > 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_. That may be true in origin, but I suspect that the similarity to “emotion” is a large part of why the word “emoji” caught on. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2025, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/23 "2025-07-03T20:20:37Z")
No. An argot is a language intended to be used and understood by a small subset of the population to preserve their exclusivity. Emojis are a writing system, not a language, just like our alphabet is a writing system, not a language. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2025, 9:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/24 "2025-07-03T21:31:47Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > 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. I was thinking about sentence tags as analogous to emojis - glad to see I was on the right track. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2025, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/25 "2025-07-04T14:50:25Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > No. An argot is a language intended to be used and understood by a small subset of the population to preserve their exclusivity. Emojis are a writing system, not a language, just like our alphabet is a writing system, not a language. There’s a sense in linguistics that the spoken language is the “real” thing, and that the written form is just a representation of the spoken language. And that’s been true for the vast majority of history. But I think it’s starting to change. It’s now possible, for instance, to have a word like “pwn”, whose spelling is absolutely definitely fixed, but whose pronunciation is subject to some debate. And I think it’s also possible to have a statement that it’s possible to express clearly and distinctly through emojis, or a combination of emojis and text, which cannot be so clearly and concisely expressed via spoken language. And there are some communities that communicate within themselves primarily or entirely through text, including emojis, and some such communities that use particular emojis in particular ways in order to be exclusive and to distinguish non-members from members. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2025, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/26 "2025-07-04T16:10:26Z")
Xu, at least, uses conventional punctuation marks as punctuation; the pictograms themselves are not punctuation. This makes the text much more readable: [![](https://i.ompldr.pw/nkhzjs.png) ](https://i.ompldr.pw/nkhzjs.png) ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2025, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/27 "2025-07-04T19:30:39Z")
There’s a long list of words that came into existence only by the misreading or miscopying of another word, going back to ancient times. That’s no proof of anything except that written language can have an impact on spoken language, including written errors. That becomes more likely where literacy is widespread. A general tendency of the modern age is widespread literacy, having nothing to do with emojis. Pictograms have been found useful for ages, like on signs. Particular glyphs have been employed by subgroups for special meanings long before computer graphics. It’s all nothing new under the sun. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2025, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/28 "2025-07-04T19:33:41Z")
My browser refused to allow access to anything on that page. It doesn’t trust that site. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2025, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/29 "2025-07-04T19:42:57Z")
Johanna, That was just a screenshot from here: > **[Xu Bing 徐冰 | Book from the Ground (2012) | Artsy](https://www.artsy.net/artwork/xu-bing-xu-bing-book-from-the-ground)** > > From Eslite Gallery, Xu Bing 徐冰, Book from the Ground (2012), Print, 50 × 66 cm What I don’t know is whether he translated text into emoji, or whether he genuinely tried to compose directly in emoji; there is some identifiable grammar either way. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2025, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/30 "2025-07-04T20:28:10Z")
Thanks; I don’t know why, but the second time I came here and looked, my browser allowed it. _Weird scenes inside the web mine_ I find it quite intelligible. Somebody has an alarm clock that plays Beethoven’s 5th symphony, and the clock has a snooze button. I gotta admire the cleverness that went into it. There are authors who produce literary stunts with constraints like: write a whole novel without using the letter e. Xu Bing took on the constraint of telling a story with pictograms. This method is also not new; the novelty is doing it on a computer with the wide range of electronic pictograms available. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2025, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/31 "2025-07-04T21:53:57Z")
There was a science fiction writer (Melissa Scott, IIRC) who imagined a future in which most people had not learned to read “realprint” (what we call printed text) but could read only what she might have called emoji, had emoji existed when she wrote it. At the time, it occurred to me that what she was imagining was a kind of pictographic writing, like Kanji, and that is much harder to learn than ordinary alphabetic writing, so I didn’t buy it. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2025, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/32 "2025-07-05T00:56:55Z")
Neal Stephenson had the same thing in _The Diamond Age_ (IIRC). He may have written that more “literate” people knew [vastly] more glyphs (compared to those who only care about what buttons to press on the free food dispenser), so again something like kanji. However note that kanji represent an actual language (e.g. Classical Chinese), and also that only a minority of kanji are pictographic— most are phono-semantic compounds. Even the pictographic ones have been stylized in such a way that discerning what they picture may not be trivial. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2025, 10:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/33 "2025-07-05T10:11:52Z")
Hanzi/kanji are logograms, not pictograms. Each one stands for a specific word. The difference is that one and the same picture could be put into different words by different people; there could be a variety of wordings to describe the same situation. But the glyph representing a specific word can only be _that_ word, not a synonym or periphrasis in other words. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2025, 10:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/34 "2025-07-05T10:41:59Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > 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](https://lingthusiasm.com/post/186862831937/transcript-episode-34-emoji-are-gesture-because). I do encourage folks to check this out. Two linguists have actually studied this issue–and written articles on the subject. Here’s a more in-depth article by one of the linguists. > **[Emoji aren’t ruining language: they’re a natural substitute for gesture 🔥🔥🔥](https://theconversation.com/emoji-arent-ruining-language-theyre-a-natural-substitute-for-gesture-118689)** > > Instead of worrying that emoji is replacing competent language use, we can celebrate that emoji are creating a richer form of online communication that returns the features of gesture to language. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2025, 11:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/35 "2025-07-05T11:09:27Z")
That’s right. They’re a very useful adaptation of writing for the internet medium. The same was true of emoticons 30 years ago. I remember back then it was the conscious intent of using emoticons, the reason why they developed, which was already widely understood 30 years ago. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2025, 11:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440/36 "2025-07-05T11:53:54Z")
And as to why we suddenly need emojis/emoticons for writing when we previously didn’t - chat and email (and internet discussion boards) proceed at the speed of in-person conversation, whereas pre-Internet writing generally did not. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-emoji-as-language/1020440.md?page=1)