Sex! Conflict! International standards bodies! The brief history of emoji is far more interesting than it has any right to be, and over the next few months Iâll be taking a look at where the worldâs newest language* came from, how it works and where itâs going.
It started with a heart.
In the mid-1990s, Japan found itself in the grip of a pager boom. Sales of âpocket bellsâ, or poke beru,1 ran at over a million per year, with the countryâs largest mobile network, NTT DoCoMo, taking the lionâs share.2 Elsewhere in the world, pagers were the preserve of businesses and hospitals where they called trauma surgeons to the emergency room or managers to the telephone. In Japan, however, pocket bells were increasingly sought after by teenagers: by 1996, almost half of all female high school students owned one, and peak pager hours had shifted from during the working day to the late evening, when the airwaves buzzed with teenagersâ illicit messages.3
- 1.
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Kristof, Nicholas D. âJapanâs Favorite Import From America: Englishâ. New York Times.
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- 2.
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Lippit, Tamiko. âJapan Teens Flip for Private Pagersâ. International Herald Tribune.
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- 3.
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Ito, Mizuko, Misa Matsuda, and Daisuke Okabe. âYouth Culture and the Shaping of Japanese Mobile Media: Personalization and the Keitai Internet As Multimediaâ. In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, 41-60. MIT Press, 2006.
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- NARRATOR: But is emoji really a language? Stay tuned. â˘
Comment posted by Adam Rice on
At risk of being accused of a punctilious attention to detail (which would be completely out of place here), the first three digits in a 7-digit US phone number do not make up the area code, they’re the exchange, which is purely historical concept at this point.
Comment posted by Keith Houston on
Hi Adam — thanks for the comment! I’ve updated the post to use “phone number prefix”. How does that sound?
Comment posted by Phillip Helbig on
Right. The seven-digit number can (and in many cases must) be preceded by three more digits; these are the area code.
With regard to exchanges, originally 535 was JE5 (that’s why there are letters next to the numbers), for example JE standing for Jefferson Heights, the corresponding neighbourhood.
555 is a common exchange in movies and television, because if a real number is used, there are enough bozos who will call it. Read up on 8675-309. :-)
Comment posted by Keith Houston on
Hi Phillip – thanks for the further clarification! Phone numbers (and postcodes) are fascinating studies in pre-computing systems design.