Emoji as a Lingua Franca

Emoji is the language for non-verbal communication, which has just a few alternatives.

As long as it remains an efficient way to give cues on non-verbal signals, mainly facial expressions, it should remain to be the lingua franca.

The issue to be concerned is the “accents” of emoji. Emojis differ in various providers, which are shown differently for the same facial expressions. Usage of emoji across different platforms may lead to distorted messages, as there are not necessarily equivalent or even similar emojis. As a solution, some users try to upload pictures of their favoured emoji instead of those provided by the platform, which I consider another language for non-verbal communication.

The problem of pictures is that they are not universal. Receivers of a picture may not have the context that the sender expect them to have, so reading those pictures is like listening to an unfamiliar dialect.

So the drawback of Emoji is not a big issue when compared to other alternatives for non-verbal communication. As it is almost not possible to have a language more abstract that Emoji in non-verbal communication, it should remain to be the lingua franca, as a language for non-verbal communication in written form.

There are still rooms for languages not in written form for non-verbal communication, but they probably cannot replace Emoji, at least in short term.