A universal language

The birth of the emoji 👶

The story begins in the late 1990s, when Shigetaka Kurita, an employee with Japanese mobile network NTT DoCoMo, began working on an idea that might lure teenagers to a new mobile internet service.

He created 176 characters, each 12 pixels square, which took inspiration from Kanji – the Japanese script originating in China – and manga, the hugely popular comic art.

Mobile phone manufacturers doubted the potential of the resulting array of birds, suns, watches, and broken hearts, but Kurita’s hunch was right. They were a hit.

His original set is now part of The Museum of Modern Art’s collection in New York.

For about 15 years, emojis were Japanese through and through: no symbol for cheese, but the bento box, tengu goblin and kadomatsu – a pine decoration associated with New Year – were all present.

Their popularity in Japan was no coincidence. In a culture that prides itself on sensitivity and etiquette, emojis were able to bring new context, almost a softness, to short-form communications.

Their global popularity was kick-started by Google, which realised that Japanese take-up of its GMail service would depend on emojis being included. But the company discovered that existing sets of emojis displayed differently on different mobile networks, creating a chaotic mess of mojibake, or garbled characters. This was when Unicode was asked to help out.

As the international organisation that regulates and standardises computer text, Unicode’s job is to ensure that symbols display consistently across all devices. In October 2010, a selection of 722 emojis were given official codes, effectively putting them on a par with Latin, Arabic and other scripts.

The aforementioned eye-roll emoji has the code of U+1F644; any device that recognises Unicode and has an emoji font installed will display an eye-roll if someone sends you one.

Today, Unicode is still the emoji gatekeeper, making annual decisions on which ones we get to use. In recent years, it has had to deal with vociferous demands for greater diversity, new objects and new concepts to be represented.

Jennifer Daniel, chairwoman of Unicode's emoji subcommittee, is a strong advocate of more inclusive emojis, and is eager for “globally relevant concepts” to be submitted – although the list of those under consideration is long.

“I think a good proposal is one that takes a look at existing patterns and behaviours of how people communicate, and isn't trying to invent something that people aren't already using in a certain way, or be theoretical about how it can be used,” she said in a recent podcast published by Emojipedia.

Combining existing emojis to capture an idea is something she encourages, rather than demanding a new one.

“We don't have to invent new letters to create new words, and what we're seeing now is people's emoji vocabularies getting more sophisticated,” she says.

“Maybe they still use the same seven emojis, but they're using them differently.”

As use of emojis grows, they adopt several meanings.

A study conducted by Alexander Robertson, a linguist at Edinburgh University, gives specific examples of how such meanings change.

The frog emoji can mean, variously, “that’s none of my business”, a signifier of gossip sharing and, of course, simply “frog”.

In 2013, the skull emoji began to mean something new: dying with laughter, or embarrassment.

“That’s pretty sophisticated usage, with a long chain of meaning,” says Keith Houston, author of Shady Characters, a book exploring the history and usage of punctuation.

“I sometimes see people using emojis in a really clever or appropriate way, where they’ve exactly nailed their meaning, making it much clearer, or more interesting or vibrant. And that’s something to be played with and mastered, just like language.”

This sophistication, which remote observers of emojis may not fully appreciate, prompts the question of what these little symbols really are. A language? A script? A modern-day version of hieroglyphics? Robertson and his fellow academics are still grappling with this question.

“Some people believe that emojis are absolutely a language, and they will replace all other language in our lifetime, while others believe that they’re silly pictures that don't really mean anything,” he says.

“What our recent paper does is nudge towards that first position: if they're not a language then they do have language-like properties.”

After writing extensively about emojis, Houston came to this conclusion: “The truth is that they are ex­actly what they look like: a grab bag of tenu­ously-re­lated pic­tures of people, things and activ­it­ies.” But while they don’t have the sophistication of language or the flexibility of scripts, that doesn’t mean they’re not useful, he notes.

“They might have star­ted out as mere pic­tures of things, but cour­tesy of the way they co­ex­ist with con­ven­tional writ­ing, they lend them­selves to more subtle uses.”

They can help us fill in gaps in communication caused by not being able to see people’s expressions or body language, or hear their tone of voice. And because their number is relatively limited, and display fairly consistently across platforms, they encourage us to be creative.

Houston draws a comparison with animated GIFs, which are increasingly used in messaging and on social media to communicate a thought or an idea.

“Each emoji comes with its own meanings, whereas there's an infinite number of images out there, and it’s not creative to find one of those and use it,” he says. “It's playing around within constraints that make emojis more interesting, and makes them feel more like language.”

For all the academic studies of emojis, it still hasn’t conferred upon them the respectability enjoyed by other script. There’s no place for them in legal judgments, government documents or even the traditional novel. But they’re young, and time is on their side.

“Today’s kids, who know and grow up using emojis – who knows what their business emails will look like when they’re adults,” says Robertson. “And in any case,” notes Houston, “if emojis are used in 90 per cent of the communication that you consume on a given day, who cares if they’re respectable.”

However, the pressure on Unicode to include more emojis in their standard may ultimately lead to the whole emoji project becoming unwieldy. Different ways of embedding images in text – stickers, GIFs and the like – may end up taking over.

If so, emojis may come to be seen as a technological quirk that briefly bestowed us with these tiny pictures to litter our texts, tweets and emails. But while they’re still around, they’re adorable and deeply valuable. And I mean that most sincerely. No eye roll.