Emojis are the next step in the evolution of writing.
In the past 100,000 years, humans have gone from being just another species to being the kings of the world. We started out confined to North Africa, but anatomically modern humans made it to Asia about 80,000 years ago, Australia around 45,000 years ago, Europe about 40,000 years ago, and the tip of South America about 14,000 years ago.
Why did we take over the world? One of the big reasons — and arguably, the reason we survived as a species — is our language. Humans have by far the most complex language abilities among all species on the planet, which lets us cooperate with one another and make plans in ways no other animals can.
Today, we have two ways of communicating with one another: spoken language, and written language. And in our modern society, written language is crucially important — most people in first-world countries couldn’t even imagine living without writing.
But written language wasn’t a part of our evolutionary history. In fact, writing was first invented in modern-day Iran just 5,000 years ago — 9,000 years after we had finished colonizing the planet.
The history of writing.
Why was written language invented in the first place? Today, we use it to write and communicate with one another. You might think it was invented to record important dates, or to make it easy to send messages across large distances, or to propagate religious ideas. But in fact, it was first invented by warlords to keep tax records.
Part of the evidence anthropologists used to figure this out is that the first writing wasn’t very sophisticated. you could say things like, “John $100”, meaning “John owes the government $100”. But you couldn’t express a complex idea, and you couldn’t write an article like this one.
Over time, written language evolved into what it is today. As people had more and more ideas, they needed better and better ways to record those ideas. They invented new forms of written language, like punctuation, pronouns, and letters. And slowly, written language became more and more sophisticated.
But written language is still evolving.
Today, written language is a lot better, but it still isn’t perfect. For instance, you can use writing to express an idea, but it’s a lot harder to use writing to express an emotion or a feeling, as you can with spoken language.
In 1967, UCLA psychologist Albert Mehrabian wrote a paper saying that only 7% of human communication lies the actual words you use. 38%, meanwhile, is the way you say those words, and 55% is your body language.
When you speak face-to-face, you get all 100% of your message across. And when you talk on the phone, you get 55%.
But when you read something, you don’t get very much. The words you see account for 7%, and a few punctuation marks and stylistic choices might make up for some of the rest, but you’re still only getting a small fraction of what you’d get face-to-face.
Is there a way to capture any of that lost meaning?
How the internet is changing written language.
Once upon a time, writing was mostly used professionally. People read newspapers, scientific papers, and legal documents. But aside from letters, all social communication was done by voice.
In other words, written language stayed in the professional realm — where people had to look serious. And when you’re trying to look serious, you usually don’t want to express emotion. Meaning there was no reason for written language to carry much emotion.
But today, for the first time in history, people are writing to each other on a large scale. Recent generations don’t call each other much. Instead, they email, text, and direct message their friends. They post in Discord servers and Slack groups. And they can broadcast their innermost thoughts to the public on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram.
As more and more people have started using written language socially, the flaws in written language have become obvious. And people are finding ways to fix them.
For instance, it’s really hard to express sarcasm with writing. So many online forums have special fonts that people use to indicate that someone’s being sarcastic.
Also, picture memes were invented, which combine pictures and texts to express complex, hard-to-describe ideas. They work by creating a built-in analogy with something people understand, and in an emotionally salient way that words on a page can’t compete with.
Where emojis come in.
I’ve already mentioned that one of the big things written language doesn’t capture is emotion. To fix this, people have invented “emotion marks” to help people put their feelings on paper.
Even before the internet, the English language already had two emotion marks: the question mark, and the exclamation mark. You can use either mark to add to or even completely change the meaning of a sentence. It’s writing’s version of tone of voice.
However, there are far more than two human emotions, and for a long time, written language couldn’t express most of them.
That’s where emojis come in: they help add an emotion to an idea. First, they were just random characters strung together to look like a face in a certain position. Then, we created emojis that looked more like faces, other non-face symbols that represent feelings (like 💯 and 👏), and symbols that represent certain nouns (like 🐶 and 💰).
Learning emojis.
Right now there are 3,633 emojis in Unicode Standard. It’s not inconceivable that one day, the average person will know them all. The average educated Chinese person knows about 8,000 Chinese characters, for comparison, and those are much less intuitive than emojis are.
However, these days, you can navigate online forums pretty well just knowing a small minority of those emojis. If you want to learn, an easy shortcut is to learn the emojis that are used most often, and then try to work them into your lexicon. (If you’re curious, you can view the top 50 here.)
Where will emojis go from here?
Right now, emojis are still in their infancy. And like any new technology, it’s hard to tell where they’re going.
It’s possible that in the year 2200, there will be a universal “emoji language”, with few or no non-emoji characters. That would let people all over the world easily talk to each other online through writing, regardless of where they’re from or what spoken languages they know.
Another possibility is that emojis will mix with existing written language. In Chinese, for instance, emojis may replace certain characters that represent simple, easy-to-picture ideas, while more complex ideas would still be represented with characters. And in alphabet-based languages like English, emojis may replace certain nouns — people may use an emoji of a dog instead of saying “dog”, for instance.
Finally, it’s possible that we’ll keep using them the way they’re used today: to add a feeling to a written idea.
Hi! My name’s Theo. I hope you liked this article — if you did, feel free to scroll down, and you’ll see a few of my other posts.
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Happy trails!
