Emoji: Japanese Characters that Became a Global Language
exploring the origin of emojis and looking at a few that are often misunderstood
Do you speak emoji? Have you ever used them? Anyone who uses social media almost certainly has. Emojis are those little pictographs now commonly incorporated into text-based communication services. They can be broadly divided into those that express emotions, such as 🤭 and 💓, and those that provide visual information as pictograms, such as ♻️ and ♿️. British cognitive linguist Vyvyan Evans has described them as ‘the body language of the digital age’.
Emoji is a Japanese portmanteau word — ‘e’ and ‘moji’ mean ‘picture’ and ‘character’, respectively, in Japanese. The concept of emoji was born in Japan, 25 years ago in 1999, and rapidly spread worldwide. The Latin alphabet is used by 2.6 billion people, while 67.1% of the world’s population uses the internet, of which it is estimated that 92% use emojis. This means that about 5 billion people worldwide speak emoji.
As one of them, I use emojis in my social networking, in messages to friends and sometimes in business correspondence. I occasionally use emojis in my articles on Medium, too, because I want to include the Japanese culture in my work, even when writing in English.
