Emoji: Our First Global Language?

Little could Japanese graphic designer Shigetaka Kurita have known that the symbols he was tasked to design for mobile devices would become a global phenomenon. And possibly have brought into being a new global language. What he created we today call emojis. They’ve gone far beyond phones into apps, stuffed toys and other trinkets, artefacts of culture.

Today, while emojis are everywhere and on the surface may seem fun, annoying to some and just an aspect of everyday life, they are also geopolitically loaded and bring in power dynamics, cultural representations and societal impacts. Let’s explore the emoji and the possibility of them becoming our first (aside from math), global language.

Perhaps too it is fitting that emojis arose from Japan to begin with. The evolution of the written Japanese language itself is largely based on symbols. It is a combination of three writing systems; Kanji (symbols borrowed from Chinese), Hiragana, a phonetic alphabet and Katakana, another phonetic alphabet mainly used for foreign words and sometimes for emphasis, like italics in English.

There were very few emojis when Kurita created them in 1999 for Japanese telecoms company NTT DoCoMo. They were an immediate hit, but it took another decade from the emoji to become more globally adopted. The launch of the iPhone in Japan in 2008 included emojis and well, the rest is history. In 2016, the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) acquired his original set of 176, acknowledging their cultural importance globally.

Symbolism is deeply rooted in the evolution of human languages and some languages today are still heavily reliant on symbols, such as Chinese and Korean. Our earliest use of symbolism was likely through gestures, grunts and other sounds with facial expressions. Eventually we started using symbols by carving into materials and painting on cave walls.

Eventually, we started to use symbols that represented sound (the Rebus principle) then alphabets with individual sounds (phonemes), to where we are today. Remember your ABCs!

Languages are considered important cultural artefacts and vital to a cultural identity, so they can quickly become political. In the Canadian province of Quebec, there are strict language laws in place to protect the cultural value of French. They’ve been in place for decades, but to this day spark deep public debate.

Emojis too, have shown that they can be politicised and have power and sociocultural implications. One outcome we see of this is how Apple pushed to have more inclusive emojis with skin tones and other inclusive symbols such as the rainbow for the LGBTQ+ element of society.

The way emojis are decided upon is through the Unicode Consortium, who also sets standards for all modern software products. All the Tech Giants participate as well as some non-profits and the Emojipedia, which helps people track and see new emojis. The Unicode Consortium is based in California and thus it has sometimes come under scrutiny for having significant American influence over the development of emojis, but this is largely unfounded given how global emojis have become.

Today, however, there is still debate over which emojis are added every year and how cultural identities are represented. Some nations have successfully lobbied for national cultural symbols, such as Saudi Arabia for a hijab emoji and Finland, naturally, for a sauna!

Then there’s the requirement by the Chinese government that the flag of Taiwan is not allowed on iOS devices in China. The European Union lobbied to have their own flag as well. Climate change groups pushed for emojis such as the polar bear and melting ice to reflect these issues.

So emojis are geopolitical, often seen as protection of cultures and as a means of soft power promotion by governments.

To some degree, they already are, but could they truly become a language for all of humanity? Could they replace writing itself and we all just go with emojis?

As emojis are pictographic it gives them a more visual universality, so they are more easily interpreted across cultures. They’ve been adopted in every country. They are becoming more nuanced and taking on complex meanings. Emojis can be strung together to create sentences as well, much like words.

Because of these dynamics however, emojis are unlikely to become a global language. Emojis don’t have the depth and breadth of a written language, there is still a lot of room for cultural misinterpretations. There is no grammatical structure either, which allows for complex sentence structures in languages.

It is also much harder to express abstract concepts through images alone, such as philosophy and cultural nuances.

So could emojis replace writing? That too, is unlikely. Human thought is complex, often abstract and highly nuanced. Many professions such as law, science and technology require such a high degree of precision that emojis can’t provide. Nor can emojis replace poetry and literature, important elements of human cultures and societies.

While emojis may not become a global language or replace writing, it doesn’t make them any less important to humanity. They can cross cultural boundaries and provide a way to show the beauty of common human values and emotions, as they already have. We all understand a smily face and a heart, or a broken heart.

The language of emojis is still evolving, which is indicative of their cultural value to our species as a whole. Likely, they will play a supplementary role into the future. They may not become a global language per se, but they are likely to evolve in important ways.