THE EMOJI IS THE BIRTH OF A NEW TYPE OF LANGUAGE (NO JOKE)
Tyler Schnoebelen has discovered something curious about why people use the skull emoji. Schnoebelen is a linguist and the chief analyst for Idibon, a firm that interprets linguistic data. Recently he got interested in emoji. He analyzed a million social media posts containing those familiar little pictograms and found that when people talk about their phone, they're 11 times more likely to use the skull. Weird, right? But to Schnoebelen, it makes sense. Our phones, he points out, are social lifelines, and when they malfunction—a weak signal, short battery life—we're upset. "When you don't have access to your phone, or when nobody's texting you, you're socially dead," he says. So we reach for a metaphorical emoji: the skull.
Fully 92 percent of all people online use emoji now, and one-third of them do so daily. On Instagram, nearly half of the posts contain emoji, a trend that began in 2011 when Apple's iOS added an emoji keyboard. Rates increased when Android did the same two years later. Emoji are so popular they're killing off netspeak. The more we use emoji, the less we use LOL and OMG.
In essence, we're watching the birth of a new type of language. Emoji assist in a peculiarly modern task: conveying emotions in short, online texts. "They're trying to solve one of the big problems of writing online, which is that you have the words but you don't have the tone of voice," as Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist, says.
Purists are not so convinced. What have we become, children with crayons? Surely words alone can convey emotional tone. Maybe—if you're a novelist with years of experience. But most of us write speedily and conversationally on Instagram or WhatsApp. Of the 20 most frequently used emoji, nearly all are hearts, smileys, or hand gestures—the ones that express feelings. In an age of rapid chatter, emoji aid communication by adding an emotional meaning to the message.
We also use emoji to express a sort of ambient presence, when words alone aren't enough. Ryan Kelly, a computer scientist at the University of Bath, has found that texters often exchange a few emoji as nonverbal conclusion to a conversation. "You might not have anything else left to say," Kelly says, "but you want the person to know that you're thinking of them." So you send a couple of pandas. Or telescopes! Or some other symbol that seems witty. This is another aspect of emoji—many are open-ended. In fact, it is known that friends use that flexibility to assign their own private meanings to specific emoji. (My wife and I use the Easter Island head to connote absurdity.)
People are even developing syntax and rules of use for emoji. Schnoebelen found that when face emoji are used, they tend to occur before other objects. If you text about a late flight, you'll put an unhappy face followed by a plane, not the reverse. In linguistic terms, this is called conveying "stance." Just as with face-to-face talk, our expression illustrates our stance before we've spoken a word.
Social pessimists can stop worrying; no linguist thinks that this means the end of writing. Natural language is our most powerful communication tool. For most people, these ideograms represent an upgrade. Language always changes: slang is born, develops and becomes obsolete, for example. But it's exceedingly rare—maybe unprecedented—for languages with phonetic alphabets to suddenly acquire a big expansion pack of ideograms. In an age when we write more than ever, emoji are the new language of the heart.