From English to Emojis: A New, Simpler, Digital Language?

From English to Emojis: A New, Simpler, Digital Language ? Andreea Pele1 (1) The Department of Communication and Foreign Languages The Faculty of Communication Sciences, The “Politehnica” University of Timisoara, andreea.pele[at]mail.upt.ro Abstract My paper looks at what is hailed by experts as the emergence of a new digital language, that of the emojis. I intend to examine how, and more importantly why, communication on mainly Facebook and Instagram has evolved from a stultified Internet English to an even more simplified way of getting one's meaning across. At the same time, I assert that emojis are a natural progression of the visual culture we are living and generating content in. Keywords: emoji, digital language, written language, visual culture, digital communication

1. Introduction Young people cannot seem to envisage communication on mobile devices without them anymore. The Oxford Dictionary named one as the Word of the Year in 2015. And it is not even a word. It is an emoji, a picture that roughly translates as “laughing with tears of joy.” However, it was not these words that received the award, it was the image itself:

Both as a digital entity and as a word, the emoji originates from Japan where, long before the age of smartphones, teenagers had been using them on pagers (Clark, 2015). It is important to point out that the Europeans, too, had had an equivalent, the emoticon, or the smiley, created in 1982 by Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist. He devised a sideways smiling face :-) in order to deal with confusion on Internet messaging boards in distinguishing between serious or joking content. The difference between the emoji and the emoticon is that the former is now a fully-fledged picture, no longer requiring a combination of keys. At the same time, emojis are not only facial expressions, they are also animals, food, fireworks, buildings, or cars. In the Western mobile phone communication the emoticon and the emoji coexist peacefully. In 2010, the Uniboard Consortium, consisting of representatives from the current digital powerhouses, namely Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Adobe Systems or Google, approved a fixed setoff emojis to bring into worldwide circulation. In 2011, Apple introduced it to its iOS5. Samsung quickly followed suit on its Android phones. Since then, the use of emojis in communication has exploded. For instance, trackers say that, at the moment, 92% of all people employ emojis (Thompson, 2016). In 2012, a year after Apple introduced the emoji keyboard, Instagram, another blogging platform, reported that 20% of its users employed them. In 2015, the number rose to 40%. And, perhaps not surprisingly, users on Instagram tend to use emojis more than those on Facebook. But we will come back to that later.

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The rise in the number of people using emojis when they communicate has been so steep in these five years since their introduction to digital culture that it has prompted some voices to contend that emoji stands on the verge of evolving into a completely new, pictorial language. To support that claim, both parties point towards various efforts which have resulted, for instance, into the translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in emojis (Emoji Dick):

Figure 1: First page of Emoji Dick

The creations of Joe Hale are another illustrating example. The artist has transformed several famous children’s stories into emoji posters, namely Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland which has been reinterpreted with emojis into what is known as the Wonderland Emoji Poster, Peter Pan became the Neverland Emoji Poster, and Pinocchio, the Pleasureland Emoji Poster. The Bible has also been anonymously translated in emoji on Twitter and Beyonce’s “Drunk in Love” video has received the same treatment. What I want to say with these examples is that emojis have become a serious phenomenon, independently from the back-and-forth of conversation on Facebook or Instagram. But are doomsday claims of them killing off the written, English language true? 2. Emojis, broken English and visual culture The surge of hearts, laughing with tears of joy, and toothy grins in digital conversations is not surprising for two main reasons. Firstly, as we all know, emojis add the all important emotion to a written, digital conversation which is usually devoid of any intonation or visual cues. Their Japanese name, emoji, is informative: e – picture, mo – writing, ji – character (Clark, 2014). The European variant, emoticon is a portmanteau word made up of “emotion” and “icon.” Secondly, digital culture is also powerfully visual, which is demonstrated by the popularity of Instagram, a platform dedicated solely to pictures, or Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and many other similar sites with user-generated content, both written and visual. This digital culture also thrives on speed and conciseness, which are two features that emojis excel at. In the “age of rapid chatter,” how Wired journalist, Clive Thompson (2016) aptly calls it, rather than waste precious moments trying to accurately convey one’s feelings, users only have to pick which emoji best sums them up and press send. In an early paper from 2007, I discussed the prevalence of English as the language of the Internet. Almost 10 years later, despite the diversification of languages when it comes to operating systems or applications, on international boards and groups, English prevails. It is not, however, a literary, Oxford English, but a rather broken one: the English of memes, of computer games and computer gamers, a stultified English proliferated by the Internet, on sites such as 9gag, where it thrives. Unsurprisingly, the more serious the Facebook page, the fewer emojis are employed, for instance on Grammarly, one of the staunchest champions of literary English on Facebook.

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In this context of broken English and visual culture, it should not come as a great surprise how easily social media users adopted emojis as means of expression. It should not come as a great surprise that expressing feelings and thoughts became a small picture. The ultimate simplification. The emoji contains both the seeds of evolution and of involution. Worriers fear that, in the existing ripe conditions, we are witnessing the demise of written English. Linguists, however, are pointing out that communication solely through emojis is akin to communicating through grunts and gestures (McCulloch, 2016). It cannot be a self-standing language. But it does add an important visual dimension when attached to written language. Recounting a conversation with a friend when, overwhelmed with how much she should have written, she responded with a single emoji, Alice Robb (2014) contends that emojis allow us to communicate without actually saying anything, saving people from having to actually spell out their feelings. This brings us back to the idea of communicative conciseness. Other observers of the emoji phenomenon point out that a single emoji is no longer enough, especially when there are so many to choose from (Clark, 2014). It is this very wealth of options that may have actually led to people stringing up several emojis to express more complex emotions. I myself use them, some times as stand alones, most often as accompaniment to text. In accordance with the 9gag/Grammarly dichotomy, the more serious the post on Facebook, the fewer emojis I used. One of the most knowledgeable scholars in all matters emoji, Tyler Schnoebelen, who wrote his PhD thesis on the subject, has analyzed millions of posts on Twitter, called tweets, and has noticed a pattern emerging from the chaos. For instance, emojis tend to appear at the end of a written message (Steinmetz, 2014). The following example comes from Instagram, a pictures-only platform, where unsurprisingly users heavily employ emojis in the captions to their posts, as well as in their comments. I have cropped the screenshot to just the caption below the original picture of a dog and two of the comments that were offered by the application, in order to illustrate this rule.

Figure 2: Emojis on Instagram, at the end of a written message

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When emojis are used within longer phrases, they often appear after separate ideas, or sentences, acting almost like a punctuation mark (Steinmetz, 2014):

Figure 3: Emojis on Instagram, within a message

Moreover, Tyler Schnoebelen discovered that in communication with the help of only emojis, utterances tend to fall into two main categories: they are either thematic or they respect a brief linear narration (Steinmetz, 2014). The thematic emoji are nicely illustrated by the three accompanying the first sentence in the Figure 3. All three are connected: the first, being obviously the pasta emoji, the second, the leaf emoji may be interpreted as basil, a common condiment to pasta, the third emoji, the wine glass, suggesting that the pasta is enjoyed together with this alcoholic beverage. Other, more classical examples are the Happy Birthday string of emoji (the cake, present box and the fireworks, a variant of which can be seen in Figure 2) or the Christmas string (the Santa, the Christmas tree, and the present box emojis). The linear narration that Tyler Schnoebelen observed can be accurately illustrated with this example of a love story:

Figure 4: Linear narrative love story

As opposed to the thematic arrangement of emojis, here the order is important in order to get the narrative across: boy sees girl, boy likes girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl refuses boy, boy is sad, boy cries, boy drinks wine/alcohol. Scrambling the order would lead to a completely different story. The first emoji, the straight face, represents the “stance,” the user’s general attitude about the rest of the phrase/story, much like Scott Fahlman’s emoticons :-) or :-( (Thompson, 2016). These are some of the reasons prompting observers to wonder weather we are undergoing a gradual return to the pictorial languages of the past. Visual communication is not new in human history. Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese ideograms, and as an expert in visual language, Neil Cohn (2015) points out, comic books, as more a contemporary example, are just some other avatars of human, visual communication. Vyvyan Evans (2015), a professor of linguistics also takes a look at emojis as opposed to written language, showing how the former fulfill the same functions as the latter, namely to convey ideas and to influence the attitudes of others. Talking about the symbolism of written language as opposed to the iconicity of emojis, he also demonstrates that it is not all black and white: some written English is based on iconicity, for instance onomatopoeia like “buzz,” “splash,” “bang,” “vroom.” At the same time, he shows how emojis can act symbolically despite their very pictorial nature. Neil Cohn (2015) again goes even further by purporting that we have nothing to fear from emojis because, in order for them to become a true language, they would need grammatical rules. Moreover, they lack flexibility due to their limited vocabulary. Users cannot make up new emojis; that power rests with the Unicode Consortium. As a result, users are forced to limit their communication to a list, which might explain the need to include several in a string.

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At the other end of the spectrum is the opinion that what makes emojis so popular is the fact that they are open-ended, open to interpretation, since we mentioned earlier their symbolic traits. For instance, the leaf emoji in Figure 3 which can be interpreted as basil, or the opening sentence to Emoji Dick, in Figure 1, “Call me Ishamel.” Perhaps the most notorious flexibility of emojis is embodied by the controversial eggplant emoji, or the taco emoji, both of which having an additional vulgar connotation, so much so that, at least for a period, Instagram banned the eggplant hashgtag from its search option (Highfield and Leaver, 2016). A superficial search performed on September 7 2016, shows how most Instagram profiles with the eggplant emoji in their name and description are associated to pornographic content. After studying all these points of view, it becomes clear that what people are worried about when they speak of emojis being the death of written language is the fact that for the sake of conciseness and out of convenience, digital users will increasingly prefer to choose from a limited number of fixed options. Herein lies the danger to language. The pinnacle of human expression, and literacy, is in fact the ability to convey a wide range of emotions through written language, words rather than pictures. When you choose an emotion from a list, or at least you try to approximate one, it is exactly this linguistic richness that may end up being eroded, the ability to tell the difference between “dismayed” and “distressed.” As already mentioned and easily proven by a brief glance at content on Facebook and Instagram, digital communication does not belong to literary English. The more broken it is, the more it needs nuances to get the meaning across. This means that that for the foreseeable future emojis are here to stay and provide that service. 3. Conclusion This paper has endeavoured to show how emoji language has evolved from Internet English and digital communication’s emphasis on conciseness and speed of reaction in a predominantly visual, digital culture. As to it becoming a new language, various linguists and journalists have shown that at the moment emojis are quite rudimentary. However, human language has known pictorial stages in the past, so the fact that emojis have appeared in the already discussed circumstances of our digital culture might be considered a natural progression. But will their apparent simplicity sound the death knell for written languages? Most likely not. As linguist Gretchen McCulloch (2016) observes: “It’s not that emoji are killing the English language — they couldn’t if they tried. But it may be that a language that people are not putting emoji next to — that’s a language that’s in trouble.” Which means that, in the digital land of speed and conciseness, us, thumbfolks (Thompson, 2016) will inevitably prefer to “emoji” rather than “laugh with tears of joy.” References Clark, A. (2015): Emoji: the First Truly Global Language? [Online] Available: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/31/emoji-became-first-global-language, accessed September 2016. Cohn, N. (2015): Will Emoji Become a New Language? [Online] Available: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151012-will-emoji-become-a-new-language, accessed September 2016. Evans, V. (2015): Beyond Words: How Language-Like Is Emoji? [Online] Available: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/11/emoji-language/, accessed September 2016. Highfield, T. and Leaver, T. (2016) Instagrammatics and Digital Methods; Studying Visual Social Media, from Selfies to GIFs to Memes and Emoji, in Communication Research and Practice, [Online] Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1155332, accessed September 2016. MacCulloch, G. (2016): A Linguist Explain Emoji and What Language Death Actually Looks Like, [Online] Available http://the-toast.net/2016/06/29/a-linguist-explains-emoji-and-what-language-death-actually-

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looks-like/, accessed September 2016. Robb, A. (2014): How Using Emoji Makes Us Less Emotional [Online] Available: https://newrepublic.com/article/118562/emoticons-effect-way-we-communicate-linguists-study-effects, accessed September 2016. Steinmetz, K. (2015): Here Are the Rules of Using Emoji You Didn't Know You Were Following [Online] Available: http://time.com/2993508/emoji-rules-tweets/, accessed September 2016. Thompson, C. (2016): The Emoji Is the Birth of a New Type of Language (No Joke) [Online] Available: http://www.wired.com/2016/04/the-science-of-emoji/, accessed September 2016. Figures Source: Figure 1: https://aviewonculture.wordpress.com/2014/05/18/emoji-dick/, accessed September 3, 2016 Figure 2: Mobile phone screenshot, Instagram, captured September 6, 2016, personal archive Figure 3: Mobile phone screenshot, Instagram captured September 7, 2016, personal archive Figure 4: http://time.com/2993508/emoji-rules-tweets/, accessed September 3, 2016