The great emoji debate
Do emoji distract the organisers of digital scripts from more cerebral pursuits?
The way the world’s languages are displayed digitally can be a topic of raging, if somewhat arcane, debate. Coders and designers may disagree over whether a particular script has differentiated upper and lower cases, or which set of accents it needs. But the latest discussion, about emoji (the icons used in electronic communications to convey meaning or emotion — think smiling yellow faces), has been stickier than most.
It is all to do with Unicode. This is a standard that assigns numbers and a corresponding description to the characters of the world’s alphabets, as well as to many more things such as mathematical symbols. It allows different operating systems and applications to show the same characters across thousands of languages. So a WhatsApp message written in, say, Sanskrit on an iPhone in California can be read by a recipient using a Windows laptop in Kathmandu. The standard is managed by a non-profit, the Unicode Consortium, which began operations in the early 1990s. It regularly adds more characters to the list, whether for ancient languages which have letters that academics want to use, or for modern ones with relatively few speakers or with so many characters that some do not yet have an entry on the list. The Script Encoding…
