A post from Shady Characters

Emoji, part 7: the emoji tongue

This is the ninth in a series of thirteen posts on Emoji (šŸ˜‚). Start at PART 1, continue to PART 10 or view ALL POSTS in the series.


With emoji everywhere you might care to look, a nagging question remains unanswered. What are emoji? Are they a language, whatever that means? A pictographic script in the manner of hieroglyphics or Chinese characters? Or are they something else entirely? In this post we examine how emoji are, and arenā€™t, used, and what that might tell us about the nature of emoji as a whole.


Bearing in mind that I am very much not a linguist, letā€™s nevertheless start with the biggest of these questions: are emoji a language? To answer it, we first need to define what a language is. Oxford Dictionaries offers the following:

The method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way.1

Taking this definition step by step, emoji meet the first clause ā€” ā€œThe method of human communicationā€ ā€” without breaking a sweat. Weā€™re all humans here and at this point in time, a full twenty years since emoji first came into being, it is not a great stretch to claim that that we use them to communicate amongst ourselves. Equally, it goes without saying that if emoji are to be ā€œeither [a] spoken or writtenā€ language then they must be a written one. Emoji were born as visual symbols and, aside from their workmanlike Unicode names, they have no direct verbal equivalents. So far, so good.

Finally, though, can we be confident in declaring that emoji constitute ā€œwords [used] in a structured and conventional wayā€? This is less clear cut. If we assume that each individual emoji constitutes a word (by no means a settled assumption), consider how I might explain that I, šŸ˜ , am to squirt you, šŸ˜Ø, with a šŸ”«. Do we write that from left to right (šŸ˜ šŸ”«šŸ˜Ø) as we would with words, or from right to left as the direction of the water pistol would suggest (šŸ˜ØšŸ”«šŸ˜ )? Equally, can we say for sure that ā€˜šŸ”«ā€™ is a verb rather than a noun? If a verb, is it in the simple future tense? The simple past? Or, God forbid, the pluperfect? Without some kind of grammar, none of these questions is easily answered.

If we turn from grammar to semantics, we run into yet more problems. Does ā€˜šŸ”«ā€™ mean ā€œwater pistolā€ in particular rather than ā€œgunā€ in general? Do you, the reader, even see a water pistol rather than a real gun? Most major emoji vendors have replaced the latter with the former in recent years, so that even the most basic atoms of any putative emoji language are subject to change with warning.2 If emoji are a language, it is one that somehow functions without either a regular grammar or an agreed vocabulary.


1.
Oxford Dictionaries. ā€œLanguageā€. Accessed May 25, 2019.

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2.
Unknown entryĀ ā†¢

6 comments on “Emoji, part 7: the emoji tongue

  1. Comment posted by ā›° on

    2ļøāƒ£āž•3ļøāƒ£2ļøāƒ£ā˜¹

  2. Comment posted by Robert Seddon on

    I wonder whether they’re comparable to heraldic devices, with a written description (blazon) that allows flexible artistic renderings, where the blazon is the actual definition that uniquely distinguishes the design.

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Robert — so a given emoji’s name is the blazon and each different version is a particular interpretation of that blazon?

  3. Comment posted by Adriel Watt on

    Thanks for another interesting post about emoji. I think the biggest thing standing in emoji’s way of being a script is that there is no phonetic component. Even Chinese, the most successful logographic script, includes phonetic elements. One commonly cited example is the word for ‘mother’. It is made up of the symbols for ‘horse’ and ‘woman’. ‘Horse’ because it has the same sound (though different tone) ‘ma’ and ‘woman’ for obvious reasons.

    Also emoji don’t include symbols for most grammar words like prepositions, conjunctions, articles etc.

    By the way, I think the final version of the following sentence got left on the cutting room floor:

    “The first two or three two emoji I can just about agree with, but the rest seem to have more to do with the two senĀ­tences that folĀ­low in Melvilleā€™s novel: …”

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Adriel — thanks for the comment! I’ve fixed that sentence.

      As I mention in the post, some emoji are used phonetically (if only rarely), but you’re quite right about the lack of conjunctions, prepositions and so on. They just aren’t rich enough yet to qualify as a script.

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