The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book about ideograms and smileys used in electronic messages and web pages. The Emoji Code: The Linguistics Behind Smiley Faces and Scaredy Cats is shelved in the Pridi Banomyong Library. It deals with the social aspects of emoticons, humorous expressions in picture-writing, social aspects of nonverbal communication, and symbolism in communication. Its author is the linguist Vyvyan Evans, who earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from Georgetown University, Washington DC., and has taught at the University of Sussex, Brighton University and Bangor University. The Emoji Code suggests that

A fundamental feature of human communication is that it is multi-modal in nature — we use, and require, multiple modes to signal intentions and create meaning, with different modes contributing different sorts of meaning to the whole… To assert that Emoji will make us poorer communicators is like saying that using facial expressions in conversations makes your ideas more difficult to understand… Emoji enables and enhances our communicative smarts. And this is something we should all celebrate.

Professor Evans analyzes emoji as metaphors, populist expressions, technological phenomena, and political issues, adding:

Emoji adds more than a splash of color to our digital alphabet. It provides a visual form of communication that is both resonant and powerful.

While emoji are mainly appropriate for informal communication, and not for serious university emails, they can be useful in text conversations. One of the earliest suggestion that symbols might be added to traditionally written messages was by the American writer Ambrose Bierce in 1887. Writings by Bierce are available at the TU Library. In For Brevity and Clarity, an essay, Bierce states that a symbol should be introduced into writing that looks as much as possible like a smiling mouth. It should be added to every sentence that is meant as a joke or an ironical statement. In this way, the first known version of the smiley or emoticon was proposed. Over one century later, in 1999 emoji were added as a feature to Japanese mobile phones, and became more widely popular over the next decade. As we know, emoji are pictures and not just collections of typographical images or emoticons. In the Japanese language, the word emoji derives from two words meaning picture and character. The word’s origins have nothing to do with either the word emotion or the word emoticon.

Different meanings

As users of emoji know, they can often have meanings that the original designer may not have intended. For example, the emoji of nail polish has been used to suggest that the writer is putting on nail polish and does not care about whatever is being discussed. Or that the best reaction to criticism or nastiness online is to ignore it and just put on nail polish. Or that the writer feels that a great deal has been accomplished, so it is a moment to quietly put on nail polish. All of these situations were not meant in the original image, but events in daily life applied to the images and give them extra meaning. Another emoji just shows a seat, which for some writers may signify a planned trip by airplane or train, or a visit to the theater. Today there are over 2000 official emojis and the list is growing. Among especially popular emoji is the familiar Face with Tears of Joy. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the Face with Tears of Joy emoji the word of the year.

Also in 2015, the American Dialect Society (ADS), founded in 1889, a learned society dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages, or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it, which publishes the academic journal, American Speech, declared that the aubergine emoji was the most notable one of that year. Since emoji are a Japanese product, it is natural that some of them directly reflect Japanese culture. Examples are a bowing businessman or a white flower, used in Japanese schools to indicate brilliant homework. There are also many emoji devoted to showing Japanese foods, including sushi, ramen noodles and dango, a Japanese dumpling and sweet made from mochiko (rice flour), often served with green tea.  Other food emoji include O-nigiri, made from white rice formed into triangular or cylindrical shapes and often wrapped in nori (seaweed). In 2017, Sony Pictures Animation released The Emoji Movie, an American 3D computer-animated science fiction adventure comedy film starring the voices of James Corden, Jennifer Coolidge, Christina Aguilera, Sofía Vergara, and Patrick Stewart, among others. The film is about Gene, an emoji who lives in a phone belonging to a teenager. The film made a lot of money, although it did not receive positive reviews.

Academic research

Last year, ajarns from the School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA and the Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Peking University, collaborated on a research study. Entitled Untangling Emoji Popularity through Semantic Embeddings, its abstract suggests:

Emojis have gone viral on the Internet across platforms and devices. Interwoven into our daily communications, they have become a ubiquitous new language. However, little has been done to analyze the usage of emojis at scale and in depth. Why do some emojis become especially popular while others don’t? How are people using them among the words? In this work, we take the initiative to study the collective usage and behavior of emojis, and specifically, how emojis interact with their context. We base our analysis on a very large corpus collected from a popular emoji keyboard, which contains a full month of inputs from millions of users. Our analysis is empowered by a state-of-the-art machine learning tool that computes the embeddings of emojis and words in a semantic space. We find that emojis with clear semantic meanings are more likely to be adopted. While entity-related emojis are more likely to be used as alternatives to words, sentiment related emojis often play a complementary role in a message. Overall, emojis are significantly more prevalent in a sentimental context.

Note that some researchers write the plural of emoji as emoji, while others prefer to write emojis. Both are considered correct usage, although in the UK, the plural form as emoji is most often seen. The researchers express concern that although emoji are a universal language, they can often be misunderstood or miused. What emoji may mean in one nation may differ from what it will mean elsewhere. To address these challenges, they recommend:

• We present the first quantitative study that correlates emoji semantics to emoji usage.
• We measure important properties of emoji semantics based on joint embeddings of emojis and words, which are learned from the largest emoji usage data to date.
• We conduct the first analysis on the relation between emojis and words – whether emojis are used as a complementarity or a supplement to the natural language.
• We identify factors that significantly affect emoji popularity, including the structural properties of an emoji in the semantic space, its complementarity to words, and the sentiment of the context.

They conclude:

Whether an emoji is commonly accepted largely depends on its meaning, and more precisely how it is related to words and other emojis in the semantic space and how these words and emojis are used in the context. In this study, we have presented the first quantitative study correlating the semantics of emojis to their usage using the largest emoji usage data to date. We train embeddings of both words and emojis and construct a k-nearest neighbour graph. With the kNN graph, we are able to characterize the semantic relationship between emojis and words with structural property of the egonet. We also quantitatively measure the complementarity of emojis to words. Results suggest that the emoji popularity is affected by several factors, including its structural properties in the semantic space, its complementarity to words, and the sentiment of its context. In future, we plan to establish causal relationships between the identified factors and emoji popularity, with better controls for confounding variables and the causal inference techniques from the econometric literature.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)