Digital Pictograms: A New Language

Written communication has high potential of being flawed with misunderstandings, and this is where the need for something “more” arose – a cause for language to evolve. Think about a text conversation with another person, and imagine how difficult it would be to spot a joke, channel sarcasm, or receive a serious comment without the use of emojis. Think about the confusion that would occur, and then be thankful for Shigetaka Kurita who is credited with creating the emojis in 1999.

Emoji is a compound of the Japanese words “e” (“picture”) and “moji” (“character”), and they are basically pictograms that we as humans have been using to express ourselves since 9,000 BC.

It all started with the internet revolution and with chatting software, like MSN Messenger, where emojis were used to clarify the feeling or mood of a text message, and evolved to present day usage of smartphones that have all but taken over our communication world. There are millions of people using emojis in confounding frequency, and in a sense they are transforming these yellow colored pictograms to a new UNIVERSAL language.

Apple's inclusion of emojis on their OS in 2011 helped spread the culture universally where Android followed, and in 2015 the Oxford English dictionary declared it as the word of the year! Former US President Obama even thanked Japan for the introduction of emojis into our world.

Facebook joined the bandwagon when it incorporated them into its platform, and then launching reactions to posts and comments. Facebook also announced in February that it will add 1620 new ones to its existing 469 bringing the tally to a whopping 2000 emojis! Apple too announced that it is adding 56 new emojis to its iOS11 update later this year. And these are all very sound decisions, as the biggest digital population - Millennials - express emotions with them: from love and heartbreak, or shock and surprise, or euphoria and anger, to laughter with tears of joy.

And there is no doubt about the enriching effect they have had on daily conversations, where each face or icon can intonate a sentence with such clarity and precision that could almost put linguists to shame – one might say they have even broadened our vocabulary.

Here is an info-graphic published by Facebook in celebration of the World Emojis Day, with some really interesting stats that show that there are over 60 million emojis being used daily on Facebook and 5 billion emojis on Messenger every day! This is too large a number to ignore, but what is yet to be seen is the effect this concise form of communication will have on modern language and even more, on marketing and brand messaging.

(Source: Facebook.com)