Why Emojis are failing to evolve into a form of Language

Whether you love them or hate them, you have to admit, emojis have taken over. Once there was a need for a way of adding emotional resonance to the dry words sent by email, text, iMessage, WhatsApp etc. Computer programs competed to provide the solution of Smiley emoticons. Plain text emotions turned into animated colored images.

In 2007, Yahoo! surveyed 40,000 Yahoo Messenger users and found that 82% of them used emoticons in their IM conversations; 83% said that “happiness” and “flirting” are the two emotions they express most with emoticons. 57% said that they would rather tell a “crush” their true feelings with emoticons than words. And in 2016 fully 92% of all people online use emoji, and one-third of them do so daily. Emoji might be one of the fastest-growing communication methods of the digital age, but a lot of people probably think the whole thing is silly.

Let’s talk about history, let’s talk about languages

Our languages have existed for perhaps 150,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. People talked. That’s what we’re probably genetically specified for. That’s how we use language most. Languages give us the opportunity to express doubt, ambiguity, the finer gradations of thought, of course, but they can also act as multipliers of misunderstanding, as blunt weapons for banishing dissent, as vehicles for forked-tongue political rhetoric.

Writing is something that came along much later, there’s a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened, but according to traditional estimates, if humanity had existed for 24 hours then writing only came along at about 11:07 PM. That’s how much of a lateral thing writing is.

Throughout the years, language has moved from more concrete characters to less concrete versions, allowing us to communicate abstract concepts.
When our species first arose and acquired social learning that was the beginning of our story. Because our acquisition of social learning would create a social and evolutionary dilemma, determine not only the future course of our psychology but the future course of the entire world. And most importantly for this, it’ll tell us why we have language. As it turns out, that social learning is visual theft, I can learn by watching you, I can steal your best ideas, and I can benefit from your efforts, without having to put in the time and energy that you did into developing them. Language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft. Language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation for reaching agreements, for striking deals and for coordinating our activities. And you can see that, in a developing society that was beginning to acquire language. Once we have language, we can put our ideas together and cooperate to have a prosperity that we couldn’t have before we acquired it. And this is why our species has prospered around the world.

Ironically in our modern society, the diversity of languages exists to prevents us to communicate with each other. It can be difficult to decide when a new mode of communication is a “language” rather than a dialect within a larger linguistic landscape. Often, things considered by some as discreet languages are in fact creoles or dialects that do not differ enough to branch completely from parent languages. However, as with many aspects of culture, new innovations emerge, and occasionally these are distinguished as entirely new languages. since some dialects seem more different from each other than certain groups of languages do. For example, Americans might have trouble understanding Southeast Asian pidgin English speakers, but Spanish speakers might catch the gist of something said in Portuguese. Also, this does not help us to determine whether an entirely new communicative system is, in fact, a language.

Emojis as language

People enjoy writing because it’s a conscious process, because they can look backward, they can do things with language that are much less likely if they are just talking.
Casual speech is something quite different, when we’re speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word stacks of maybe 7 to 10 words. It’s much less reflective — very different from writing. Over the years the structure of written language has transformed. Now we have smartphones in our pocket which can receive messages, and we have the condition that allows us to write the way we talk. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, “do you think about those things when you talk?”
Now we can write the way we talk. In order to understand it, what we want to see is the way, in this new kind of language a new framework is coming up. Since emojis often bear graphic resemblances to our real faces, the understanding has often been that there would be no problems in interpreting them, and that the sender and the recipient would agree on such interpretation.

“Emojis are one of the most effective forms of emotional communication we use today.”
Is it a bit silly? Yes. Emojis are visual, fun and accessible. They can break down the barriers and make it easier for people to express how they’re feeling. Emoticons and emoji are changing the way we communicate faster than linguists can keep up with. But the ability to convey tone and emotion through text, without resorting to illustration, is one of the key challenges of writing. It’s what makes someone a good writer rather than an effective artist or illustrator.

On Instagram, nearly half of the posts contain emoji, a trend that began in 2011 when iOS added an emoji keyboard. Rates soared higher when Android followed suit two years later. Emoji are so popular they’re killing off netspeak. It seems that the most popular emoji have similar semantics to words like “lol/hehe” (😂), “xoxo” (❤️) and “omg” (😱).The more we use 😂/😮, the less we use LOL or OMG. On Instagram, emoji are becoming a valid and near-universal method of expression in all languages. And though emoticons may make it easier to convey different moods without much effort, they have limitations of their own. Source

Problems and Solutions

A long-standing debate has been premised on whether facial expressions mean the same thing in all cultures. Although happiness, surprise, fear, anger, contempt, disgust, and sadness are usually recognized by all human beings, but there are cultural differences in displaying of particular facial expressions and interpretation. Different cultures so Emojis can have very different meanings.
A very relevant point in this context becomes when are emojis used? For what purposes? Are they used for the purpose we understand them — that is a proxy for sending non-verbal cues — or do they have other targets? Of the 20 most frequently used emoji, nearly all are hearts, smilies, or hand gestures — the ones that emote. In an age of rapid chatter, we use emoji to prevent miscommunication by adding an emotional tone to cold copy.
Emojis do not mainly serve as indicators of users’ emotions; rather they serve many other communicative functions. They can serve as an indication of approval or disapproval of others’ messages, responses to expressions of thanks and compliments, conversational openings and closings, indications of celebration and excitement, and indications of the fulfillment of a requested task, contextualizations cues, substitutes for lexical items, and indexical signs.

How we can solve this?

• Similar rendering of emojis across multiple sources can reduce the chance of their misinterpretation. Because smileys tend to look quite differently on people’s different devices and programs.

• A graphic ranking misconstrued emojis across platforms. Cultural modeling would help enable how particular emojis are used, i.e. negatively, positively, to signify punctuation or to express emotions.

• While designing consider greater use of cultural differences, which might go beyond having the option to change the skin color of emojis.

Although Text is more powerful tool for go-to communication, but people have always built up their new norms within a group of friends or within a geographic region or perhaps even within a culture. Emojis are like an extension to them. Our languages are ever-changing and Just like netspeak, new language extensions will rise and fall. though emoticons have their own limitations, they make it easier to convey different moods without much effort. In an age where we write more than ever, It’s okay to be absorbed with emojis.

Thanks for hitting the ♥ If you found value in this article, This will tell me to write more of it!