Māori Emotikis
Emoticons — Who doesn’t love them? Nowadays we can hardly imagine social networks and apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp to work without emoticons. And honestly, how would someone 100% know whether you are being ironical or serious when you text him “It was terrible”? Over the past two years, emojis have made an incredible development. We no longer only have the standard “smiley faces” but all sorts of other things like food and drink, people, sports, activities, plants and animals, random symbols, flags,… — the list goes on! For quite some time emoticons have been multi-national as well, meaning that next to the simpson-yellow persons we also got European, African, and Asian emojis now.
Since December 21 last year the emoji variety got enlarged by special Māori emoticons that can be downloaded through an app for smartphones. Its developer Te Puia (a cultural project) even invented an own name for the new looking faces. ‘Emotiki’ includes more than 200 free Māori icons that can be shared through iPhone, Android or social media apps.
The app allows users to communicate through a green tiki, instead of the notorious yellow smiley. A tiki — or better ‘hei-tiki’, is an ornamental pendant of the Māori people and is usually worn around the neck. Hei-tiki are usually made of pounamu (greenstone), which explains the green colour of the Emotikis, and are considered a taonga (treasure) by Māori. The word ‘tiki’ originally refers to large human figures carved in wood, as well as to the small wooden carving used to mark sacred places.
But that’s not all: Other elements of tikanga are also incorporated such as hangi, boil-up, kiwi or marae emojis. To give you an idea about what these special emoticons look like, here’s a few pictures:
There’s Emotiki:
Nga Tangata:
He Taputapu (roughly, ‘Tools’):
Typical New Zealand creatures:
And Te Aoturoa (nature, with connotations of taonga):
The purpose behind this is to give people, particular young Māori, another way to express themselves and help them celebrate their culture.
I personally really like this project and think that EVERY culture should be able to share cultural traditions and habits on social media (which is quite unrealistic considering how many tribes and people exist in this world, I know). As an intense emoticon-lover I would not wanna do without the laughing emojy that is shedding tears of joy, the monkey with his two hands on his eyes and, of course, the pink unicorn! However, I am not Māori but I can imagine that they like having these Emotikis that actually give them an opportunity to share something about their culture.
