Evans - The Emoji code: the linguistics behind smiley faces and scaredy cats

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For Monica the love of my life.

Once in a lifetime you meet
someone who changes everything!
True loves way began with Emoji.

Everything has a beginning. This storys was in January 2015. It was a Friday afternoon at the end of the month, and I was in the middle of completing a mortgage application. Keen for a distraction, I kept clicking over to my email. One such click revealed a message from a desk editor at the Guardian newspaper, in London, asking me to call. Curious to see what was up, I dialled her number.

It turned out that there was a news story breaking that no one seemed to know quite how to handle. An American teenager had just been arrested in New York for making an alleged terroristic threat against the police. But what had the journos in a tizz was this: the death threat had been made using nothing but emojis, the small colourful pictograms that, today, over 90 per cent of us use to pepper our interactions on our smartphones, and on social media. There arent many language experts that even know what an emoji is. Can you write something that makes sense of this? the desk editor asked. Intrigued, I set aside the mortgage documents. Let me think about it, I replied. I need something this afternoon, she countered, apologetically. Hmm OK, I said. And while I didnt know it at the time, with those few words, an entirely new research project that would run for years and a new linguistic science of text-based digital communication was born.

I spent the rest of the afternoon reflecting on the phenomenon of Emoji. I thought about the emojis I used, safe in my comfort zone, the boring ones: the wink, smile and, sometimes, a sad face. Before then, Id never thought much about whether there were other emojis, or even where they came from. I tried to recall when I had first become aware of them. I struggled. One day they just seemed to be there, all at once, as if they had been dropped out of the sky and into our smartphones. Today emojis really do seem to be everywhere. But back in early 2015, people were just starting to use them in numbers. And I had to admit it, I didnt have a clue what some of them were supposed to convey. For instance, what did that one of the dancing twin girls with bunny ears mean?

As I began to investigate, I quickly discovered that emojis were a very recent phenomenon. It was only in 2011 that they were introduced as standard on the Apple electronic keyboard, on iPhones and iPads. They became available as standard with Windows 8 in 2012, but didnt receive full functionality across all internet browsers until Windows 10 in 2015. And on Android operating systems, which are used by the worlds biggest-selling smartphone manufacturer, Samsung, they were not standard until 2013. But 2015 seemed to be the year that Emoji made the leap from some bizarre, little-known adolescent joke, to a bona fide means of communicating with our nearest and dearest, expressing something more than what could be achieved with digital text alone. By the end of 2015, Emoji even received institutional respectability of sorts being endorsed by Oxford University Press: an emoji, no less, was named as Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year. Emoji could no longer be pigeon-holed as an amusing irrelevance, a passing fad; Emoji had gone mainstream!

I wrote my article, Can emojis be used to make terror threats?, and sent it through to the Guardian , which published it a few days later. And that was that. For the next couple of months I thought no more about it. I taught at the university, travelled to give international lectures, began work on a different book (and I completed my mortgage application, and moved house).

But the story resumed in April 2015. And this time, it wouldnt let me go. I was contacted by the London-based telecommunications company TalkTalk. Their mobile-phone division wanted to commission some research for a prospective PR campaign. They were interested in figuring out how widely Emoji was used by the UKs smartphone users, and, perhaps more importantly, how people use it, and why. Today reports on Emoji usage are everywhere; marketing companies, app developers and multinationals invest thousands and even millions in studying usage patterns. But in early 2015, little was known about these matters TalkTalk confessed to having struggled to find an expert who could help them. My article from two months earlier had sent them my way. And so I helped design a questionnaire on usage patterns that was then used by a market research company, which polled 2,000 representative adults. I analysed the results, and in doing so, produced the worlds first study into individual Emoji usage patterns. And from there, as the findings accumulated, the questions mushroomed in equal measure. The only solution to make sense of it all, I realised, was to set aside the book I was working on and write this one instead.

The rapid adoption of Emoji, in just a few years, makes it a rich (and well-recorded) case through which to explore the nature of human communication, including the nature and functions of language and other non-verbal aspects of communication. In the chapters that follow, I discuss a wide range of issues in the context of digital communication, and how these new communicative possibilities are changing the way we interact with our digital friends and followers, many of whom we have never met. In our investigation into the world of Emoji, well explore the nature of communication, how grammar works, the evolutionary origins of language, the social and cultural factors that govern language use, language change and its development, as well as the nature and organisation of language, what it reveals about the nature of the human mind, and how meaning arises when we communicate. As well see, far from being some passing fad, Emoji reflects, and thereby reveals, fundamental elements of communication; and in turn, this all shines a light on what it means to be human. Surprising as it may sound for the uninitiated, theres far more to Emoji than you might think!

Now for an aside on terminology. The eagle-eyed will have noticed already that I sometimes spell Emoji with a capital first letter: E. When I do so, I am referring to Emoji as a set of glyphs, with rules, conventions and constraints, that is used as a system of communication. And when I use emoji without an initial capital, or when I refer, in the plural, to emojis, I have in mind the individual glyphs that populate the system.

But Emoji, while a system of communication, is a code, not a language, as reflected in the title of this book. Sometimes Emoji behaves in remarkably language-like ways; not surprising really, given that language is also a system designed, ultimately, to facilitate communication. But sometimes, quite often in fact, Emoji differs quite markedly from language, in its organisation and use. Emojis, for instance, are often repeated, adding emphasis by visual repetition. But what sane individual repeats the same English phrase over and over? A line of red hearts intuitively works, making the point clear. But I love you , the English expression, is more powerful when uttered or written just once. With undue repetition, it can come to seem insincere. Just as with the forced writing of lines by a punished schoolchild, the laborious begets boredom.