Will emojis become a new language?

More than 90% of social networking users communicate through these symbols and more than 6 billion emojis are exchanged every day. On November 17, 2015 the Oxford Dictionaries announced the emoji ,  commonly known as ‘Face with Tears of Joy’, as its “Word” of the Year for 2015.

Students are doing PhDs in emoji studies. There is a serious debate about whether or not emoji is a universal language, or if it is in fact, destroying language. This image is the famous first line of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, translated into emoji. Emoji Dick is a crowd-sourced and Kickstarter-funded translation created by Fred Beneson. Approximately 10,000 sentences were  translated at least three times before the “best” were chosen for the book.

Vyvyan Evans, an expert in communication and cognitive linguistics and author of The Emoji Code, explains that these icons help to reproduce in the digital environment almost all the characteristics of human communication in the real world. The symbols work in a manner similar to non-verbal cues in face-to-face interactions (body language, intonation, and facial expressions) and communicate the nuances of mood and emotion between people who cannot see the gestures of their interlocutor. “70% of the meaning of an oral conversation comes from non-verbal cues. Emojis add personality to the text and generate empathy among users, an essential thing for effective communication,” says Evans.

Graphic symbols are so globally recognized as a new communication code that there have already been cases of people being arrested for using icons considered threatening. In 2015, US teenager Osiris Aristy, then 17, was charged with terrorism for a Facebook post with gun emojis aimed at a police officer. The young man claimed that it was a protest against police violence towards the black community and the jury acquitted him.

In 2016, a 23-year-old French man was sentenced to three months in jail for sending his ex-girlfriend messages with gun icons. After cases like that, Apple replaced the revolver icon with a water gun. “Although not a language, emojis do have meanings under the same censorship rules as other codes,” Evans says. “They can and will be used in a court of law.”