#emojis

Tatjana Scheffler @tschfflr@fediscience.org · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to on fediscience.org

These traditional emoticons created from standard punctuation characters, letters and numbers have been largely crowded out by colorful #emojis in the last 15 years. Emojis started being supported by Japanese mobile communication platforms (phones) in the 80s/90s, but became widespread world-wide only when they were introduced into the international Unicode standard in 2010 - and subsequently supported by all kinds of technology providers and software. So the 2010s is when "it all got out of control" @Kuchenschwarte@fnordon.de 😅 #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay

13

1

2

0

Tatjana Scheffler @tschfflr@fediscience.org · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @tschfflr@fediscience.org

(Little aside: The Unicode list provides an international standard of symbol encodings which should be supported - including our Latin characters as well as characters and symbols for hundreds of other languages of the world. This ensures that if you write Hindi or Korean or Arabic or Finnish, another person will be able to decipher and potentially read your digital document. Since 2010, this list also includes emojis - so my "hugging-face" will show on your computer as your "hugging-face" 🤗 ) #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay #emojis

12

1

2

0

Tatjana Scheffler @tschfflr@fediscience.org · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @tschfflr@fediscience.org

☝️ However, there is some evidence that #emojis or at least symbols similar to emoticons were used before the internet. Many people know "rebus" examples where words are replaced by little icons like in this children's book. And I've seen an example of a hand-written letter with emoji-like faces as annotations (but I can't find it right now on my computer 😬 ) #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay

16

1

4

0

Tatjana Scheffler @tschfflr@fediscience.org · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @tschfflr@fediscience.org

Two other writing systems are often compared to #emojis: #Chinese characters and #hieroglyphs. @Kuchenschwarte@fnordon.de I'm not really an expert on either, but I did study Chinese in university and recently had a long conversation with an Egyptologist colleague (who gave me the 101 on hieroglyphs 😄 ). Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was an alphabet (ie, each character roughly corresponds to a sound like p, t, k). So while the hieroglyphs resemble objects, they were not read as such, at least not in the later stages. (Btw. Latin characters also developed from picture-like objects in many cases, but it's been a long time since these pictures were recognizable) Thus, emojis do not resemble Egyptian hieroglyphs in my view - each emoji corresponds most closely to a word or concept, not a single letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay

11

1

0

Tatjana Scheffler @tschfflr@fediscience.org · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @tschfflr@fediscience.org

@Kuchenschwarte@fnordon.de "Why are emojis standardly not animated?" - a complicated question. The Unicode standard lists a code point for each emoji (and other symbols, too), as well as, roughly, its meaning (really a short name). You can see the full list below. E.g., codepoint "U+1F601" corresponds to "beaming face with smiling eyes" or 😁 . You can think of the look of that emoji on your individual platform as a kind of "font" - the platforms are free to implement the look of each emoji according to their house style. This is similar to the character "A" looking different in different newspapers, platforms, or styles. In most Western platforms emojis so far are not animated. But in many widely used Chinese platforms (WeChat and especially Weibo, for example), many emojis are animated. So I guess it's a question of style. #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

12

1

3

0

Tatjana Scheffler @tschfflr@fediscience.org · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @tschfflr@fediscience.org

@skyglowberlin@fediscience.org "Can emojis be removed from Unicode? Or are they there forever once they are in?" - As of now, once they're in, they're in. The code point in Unicode is then reserved for this symbol. This can be a problem because emojis are kind of open-ended (other than alphabets and many other symbol lists). And it's possible that some emojis turn out to be rarely used. I could imagine that eventually some platforms just stop supporting a certain emoji - but it's really useful to have an international encoding standard which is fully supported by most technology (as anyone who has programmed or written online text in the early 2000s can attest). That's why getting a new emoji approved has become so hard - we're basically creating a kind of tech debt for a potentially long time. Funny story - you could try creating a post now with a Unicode character from an "empty" code point in the emoji range, in the hope that it will get assigned in a later round. I've seen such a post on the old Twitter, which later was filled with all kinds of random emojis, when you look at it in a few years. #linguistics #emojis #WorldEmojiDay

18

1

3

0

Tatjana Scheffler @tschfflr@fediscience.org · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @tschfflr@fediscience.org

🤔 Are #emojis a universal language? - No, for two reasons. 1) They are not a language, as they do not show the properties that human languages have: grammatical structure and free combinatorics, enabling us to express complex thoughts. 2) They are not really universal. While many emojis are interpreted similarly all over the world (I guess it's pretty clear what one could mean by 🍕 ), some emoji meanings are closely tied to cultural assumptions (e.g., some of the gestures 👍 , buildings ⛩️ , food), and others are very context-dependent and might follow different conventions in various groups, including linguistic or regional groups (e.g., 🙃 for which we found strong differences between populations in Norway/US vs. Germany/Bulgaria). #WorldEmojiDay #linguistics

24

1

7

0

Tatjana Scheffler @tschfflr@fediscience.org · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @tschfflr@fediscience.org

"what are the two readings of 🙃?" - Roughly, one group sees this emoji as a whimsical, funny alternative to the "regular" smiley 🙂 , which they also read as positive ("happy, smiling"). The other group sees it as sarcastic, passive-aggressive, or uncomfortable. There are many nuances but those are the two groups. #emojis #WorldEmojiDay #linguistics

18

1

0

Tatjana Scheffler @tschfflr@fediscience.org · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @tschfflr@fediscience.org

"which emojis are used the least often?" - Great question, and we rarely find data on this! But luckily, we studied this at least for two corpora with German users (and admittedly only for face emojis). So: Many object or symbol emojis (from the "tail end" of the emoji list) are very, very rarely used. Overall, faces and hearts are the most frequent. Among the face emojis, we compiled the full list of usages from a huge Twitter corpus (semi-public communication, 2014-2022) and a much small WhatsApp chat corpus (private or group communication). You can find the frequencies in this table linked below (and sort by frequency by clicking on the column). The least frequent face emoji in the large corpus was the "frowning face with open mouth" 😦, which most people have never seen before. Personally, I think it's pretty ambiguous and not very useful, as there are better emojis for anything it might express. #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay https://tscheffler.github.io/2024-Face-Emoji-Norming/ratings.html

12

1

4

0

Tatjana Scheffler @tschfflr@fediscience.org · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @tschfflr@fediscience.org

"what about double meanings like in 🍆🥦 and 🍑?" - Ah yes, these ambiguities are very famous. In order to get a new emoji approved nowadays, it's even helpful to be able to point out additional meanings and usages that are metaphorical in this way. The Unicode consortium is wary of introducing too many new emojis, and so those that can "carry more weight" and fill many needs at once are preferred. In internet corpora the vegetable-related uses of these emojis are probably quite rare (but I must admit I haven't checked yet) - and the metaphorical meanings probably dominate. Though there are also many insider uses of emojis that aren't super widely known outside of their circle. This is comparable to other kinds of linguistic codes or innovations (e.g. in youth language) and not limited to only emojis. #WorldEmojiDay #emojis #linguistics

19

1

3

0

Tatjana Scheffler @tschfflr@fediscience.org · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @tschfflr@fediscience.org

Do young and old people interpret (or use) emojis differently? - Yes, to some extent. Actually with most emojis we see a huge overlap in interpretation and also use. But there are some frequent emojis which are, on average, interpreted differently by older and younger people in our studies. For example, the slighly smiling face 🙂 and its upside down variant 🙃 are seen as more positive by older participants, while the little dot-eyes are seen as cold and not authentic ("psychopath eyes") by younger people. Similarly, the winking smiley 😉 is used by the older group to mark any jokes or fun (similarly to the original ;-) emoticon), and younger people find it often completely inappropriate and sexually suggestive #emojis #WorldEmojiDay #linguistics

17

0

6

0

Tatjana Scheffler @tschfflr@fediscience.org · Jul 17, 2026

As this thread is slowing down (but feel free to keep the questions coming), this is also a great time to plug the public "Linguistics of Emojis" Zotero library, which we maintain. Over 300 scientific works on the linguistics of emojis - check it out! 🤓 #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay https://www.zotero.org/groups/2613859/linguistics_of_emojis/library

1

4

0

Tatjana Scheffler @tschfflr@fediscience.org · Jul 17, 2026

🧐 #AMA on #emojis for #WorldEmojiDay ❗ #linguistics

55

11

65

4

Natasha

🇪🇺🇮🇪 @Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt · Jun 16, 2024

Fascinating article by Emojipedia tracing the evolution of the first 12x12 and 16x16 emojies back to early Sharp PDAs, pagers, and Wapro electronic typewriter in the late 80s ... https://blog.emojipedia.org/new-earliest-emoji-sets-from-1988-and-1990-uncovered/ #Tech #emoji #emojis #PDA