🙋😀🙏🏼🙈    ♻️   📝🆎㊙️  ❓ ***

Could you understand the title without looking at the English translation at the end of the page?  Scientists are heavily debating whether or not there will arise a new emoji language. With 1851 emojis we are already far ahead of the ancient Egyptians who had to communicate with ‘only’ 700 hieroglyphs. The rising use of emoticons induces more and more academic interest in this new form of communication. Emojis are definitely a hot topic in the academic world.

The biggest problem with communicating trough text or chat message is that it’s impossible to use intonation, emotion or hand gestures. The invention of emojis turned out to be a great solution for this problem. It's true that certain emojis have an emotional undertone. The ones we use the most are the smiles and hearts. When words fail but we still want our correspondent to know that we are thinking about them, we use emojis.

There are two striking facts that indicate the importance of emojis.

First, scientist discovered that there exist some sort of syntax and certain rules for emoji use. For example linguist Schnoebelen found out that we put the face emoji always before an object emoji and not the other way around. 😡✈️

Secondly, and maybe more interesting, is that in 2015 Apple introduced a new racially diverse set of emojis, where you can use between five different skin tones. Besides different skin colour the update also included divers families such as homosexual couples and single parents emojis. 👍👍🏻👍🏼👍🏽👍🏾👍🏿  👨‍👨‍👦‍👦 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩👩‍👧‍👧.An ‘emoji update’ like this may seem unimportant but it shows how much concern people attach to something so banal-looking like emojis. Before the update only yellow looking emojis existed, this of course representing white people. This provoked lots of critique from coloured people who saw this as s a sign of white Western control. The same applies for homosexual people who felt left out by not recovering themselves in emojis. 

Some defeatists say that emojis will give birth to a new language and take over our spoken one, but that probably won’t happen. More scientist describe emojis as an additional language or internet slang. In times like these, where we spend so much time online, why not make use of this additional language that helps us to express our feelings? In the meantime, emojis will stay an interesting phenomenon for academic research and debate, both for linguists and for social and communication scientists.

***Emojis: a new language?