One thing that millennials like me are probably aware of is how horribly our parents use emoji. It’s not only the fact that they sometimes mistake for when offering condolences, but also how they process the emoji in a sentence. And this isn’t only a problem with our parents as digital non-natives; Academia in general has yet to explain how and why we use emoji in seemingly consistent ways that most of us (except my mom) seem to have agreed on.
It’s pretty clear that one of the main issues is that there just isn’t much research into emoji. When writing my dissertation about the topic, I could only find a handful of articles that talked about some general tendencies in emoji use that could be deduced from studying corpora of a couple thousand tweets, and a couple books that delved into the topic using mostly traditional grammar as a basis.
Honestly, I get it: it’s always difficult to study something new and institutions aren’t exactly eager to just drop a load of cash on to fund research. But just because something is hard and unfruitful doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Just try me, Academia. It hasn’t stopped me before and it certainly won’t stop me now . So, without further ado, the (not so) silly linguistics of emoji.
What do emoji mean?
The first thing we have to do is dive head-first into what my Linguistics 101 course described in a Mufasa-like manner (“you should never go there”): semantics. It’s tricky enough to study the meaning of words as it is, so how does this work with emoji?
Emoji are a type of signifier (that is, something that holds meaning) called a pictogram. These symbols are images that derive their meaning from their resemblance to something in the real world. So “” means “tree”, “” means “red car”, and so on. This is nice and clear with emoji that represent objects, but we can make it a bit spicier if we combine them so that represents one tree, but could be understood as a forest, garden, vegan buffet, etc. In this sense, our mind processes them in a similar way to Japanese kanji, where 木 means “tree”, but 林 means “forest”, and 森 means “jungle/dense woods”.
This is relatively simple: they combine to make “new” vocabulary, and most languages have this feature in some form or another. Face emoji, on the other hand, are a whole different matter. I would personally argue (and actually did in my dissertation) that face emoji have certain components that condition their meaning. The most important factor to know what they mean would probably be the mouth. If it’s smiling, it’s under the umbrella of positive emotions, which can then be more specific depending on how big the smile is, if it has hearts for eyes, etc. In this sense, the emoji could be considered like a “root”, from which we obtain variations in intensity (, , , ) or variations in the type of happiness (, , ).
Therefore, there are probably only about five or six basic emoji that correspond to five or six basic emotions: sadness , happiness , fear , anger , surprise , and disgust (this one is debatable because there is also or , but those could also be just a substitute for “throwing up” or “feeling sick”). All other face emoji would then add nuances to each of these and can even be a mix of them, like those emotion wheels that they give people in therapy who don’t know exactly what they’re feeling and have several words that lean towards one or another emotion.
But how do I use them then?
In the cases where somebody just taps on the emoji that appears on their keyboard and substitutes the word they just typed (“can you bring some ?”), emoji basically fill in for whatever the actual word is. In the last example, it would then be a noun, but it can also work with verbs (“️♀️” as a response for “what are you doing?”). Since they can substitute any thing or action they represent, it’s then safe to assume that they can take on the role of any verb or noun, but not function words like pronouns, determiners, or prepositions, as it would be rather difficult to use emoji in the place of words like “mine”, “the”, or “at”. Feel free to prove me wrong, though.
Again, here we have to draw the distinction between emoji for objects one the one hand, and face emoji on the other. Face emoji don’t really follow this logic because they generally don’t substitute anything, but rather add to whatever was said before. Take the example of a text message that can go from the sweet and appreciative “oh, you cooked dinner ” to the rather hurtful “oh, you cooked dinner ”. At this point, pragmatics and non-verbal language have entered the chat, since we can’t really translate these like we did with object emoji. Instead, we are compensating for the lack of information that is intrinsic to online communication, so emoji have been adopted as a means for expressing attitudes, intentions, humor, etc., which in turn means that their function is above the sentence level rather than belonging to a word category.
To wrap things up
In this article, we’ve seen a very brief summary of how emoji aren’t as simple as one might think, and that they can serve as a window to how our brains process language and meaning at a deeper level. Peeping through this window might be a challenge at the institutional level, and it’ll be difficult to adapt our existing models of grammar –we might even have to develop new theories to explain this phenomenon.
I, for one, am actually super excited about this. I’m hoping we get to see in the near future a collaborative effort among academics from psychology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, and honestly anyone smarter than me who can contribute. The snowball is slowly gaining traction as new studies come out, and the knowledge gained from understanding emoji can lead to advances in other fields. Imagine if we figured out how to make a computer understand how to parse emoji based on context and revolutionize machine-assisted translation, or if we discovered some neural pathway that explained some aspect of language-processing. Just exhilarating, isn’t it
