Love them or hate them, we live in an emoji filled world. Thousands of emoji now depict people and things and as the world becomes increasingly digitalised and increasingly globalised, emojis are becoming a common language and an important communication tool.
Emojis and emoticons — what’s the difference?
The word emoji means pictorial character and comes from the Japanese language, with ‘e’ meaning picture and ‘moji’ meaning character. They can be traced back to the late 1990s, when inventors in Japan began to experiment with a system of electronic expression. The words adoption in English was driven by Apple iPhone’s inclusion of emojis on their phones in 2008.
Emojis shouldn’t be confused with emoticons (emotion + icon), which while also a pictorial representation of a facial expression, use punctuation or other keyboard characters to form a facial expression, for example :0) for smiley face, ;0) for winking, ;P for sticking your tongue out or my particular favourite =^..^= for cat.
A little bit of history
Interestingly images to depict emotions have been around much longer than you might think. In 1881, Puck, an American satirical magazine, included a piece on ‘Typographical Art’, that depicted joy, melancholy, indifference and astonishment using only typography. In the late 1960s, Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita mused ‘I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket.’ And in 1982 an American computer scientist named Scott Fahlman, suggested the need for ‘joke markers’ to help reduce misunderstandings on Carnegie Mellon University’s online bulletin boards.
It is generally thought emojis were developed on an early Japanese mobile phone called the SkyWalker DP-211SW, which came loaded with 90 of the images. However, the phone did not sell well and the identities of those behind the emojis are fuzzy. The first emojis to truly take off did so in the late 1990s, when Shigetaka Kurita, working at a Japanese telecommunications company, was involved in the launch of a mobile internet platform called i-mode, a service which would allow users to access emails, news bulletins, weather forecasts and games on their mobile devices. Kurita thought it would also be useful to offer a series of images users could send as a form of shorthand, to convey information quickly and went on to design 176 of them. Such is the significance of the original images, they have since been added to the collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Emojis have been available outside of Japan since the mid 2000s. In 2011 Apple added an official emoji keyboard to their mobile operating system allowing people to access emoji directly from a keyboard on their phones — Android did the same two years later.
Emoji development
The Unicode Consortium, a non-profit corporation devoted to developing, maintaining and promoting software internationalisation standards and data, officially recognised emoji characters in 2010 and now adds new emoji to its approved list each year.
Anyone can submit a proposal but the process for submitting a new emoji is a lengthy one, taking up to two years for an emoji to travel from first draft to your phone. Detailed proposals must include an explanation of why the emoji should be adopted, what its addition would mean for the emoji language, why people would use it and ideas for how it might look. So for example, if an emoji is needed to represent beans, the proposal should explain what type of beans they are and whether they should be in a can, in a bowl or growing out of the ground?
Proposals are examined by the Unicode Consortium’s emoji sub committee and only when the sub committee comes to a consensus, is a new emoji born.
Emoji politics
Think emojis are just a bit of fun? Actually, there is more to them that you might first think. As the emoji vocabulary began to grow, people wondered why certain images were more prevalent than others, for example, why were there so many icons to describe sushi but none for tacos, burritos, or enchiladas? And why was there an emoji for the Israeli flag but not the Palestinian one?
Emoji professionals included doctors, chefs and policemen but they were all white men and there were debates about the inclusion of different types of family units — same sex parents and single parents. Headlines were made when Google, Facebook and Apple decided to replace the realistic gun emoji with a cartoon style toy gun emoji following school shootings and gun violence.
Suddenly it seemed, emojis had become an important new language but the language had no words for ‘women with jobs’ or ‘people of colour.’ It was no longer simply a matter of having the right icon to describe what you ate for lunch, emojis were also an acknowledgement of culture and identity and improvement was needed in terms of inclusion, diversity and cultural signifiers, such as foods from across the world.
The 2015 release of Unicode 8.0 allowed users to share human emojis using five different skin tones. And in 2016 following a submission by fifteen year old Rayouf Alhumedhi, it was announced that Unicode 10 would include ‘Person With Headscarf or hijab.’
In 2017 researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation proposed an emoji mosquito as a way to better describe mosquito borne illnesses like malaria and zika. In 2019 Apple announced the arrival of disability themed emojis, enabling users to send a guide dog, an ear with a hearing aid, a person in a wheelchair, a prosthetic arm and a prosthetic leg.
In 2020 the transgender pride flag emoji was released after years of rejected proposals — trans people had previously used the lobster emoji to represent themselves. And in response to the Covid 19 pandemic, Emojipedia suggested sequences of emoji to be used when talking about hygiene and social distancing measures, for example soap, hands and water drop emojis to illustrate washing hands; a train, mask and shopping trolley combination to remind people to protect themselves when in public; and two people either side of a double arrow to illustrate social distancing.
Recent updates include cultural symbols like a mooncake and a nazar amulet, mythical creatures (mermaids, genies, elves, and vampires), food (pie, sandwich, broccoli, takeout), animals (dinosaur, hedgehog, giraffe, zebra) and faces (starstruck, mind blown, shhhing and an expletive spouting angry face.) There are new ways to represent humans too including a woman cradling a baby, gender neutral emoji, emoji to represent people of all ages and emoji with different hair colours.
The future of the emoji
The story of emojis is fascinating and continually evolving. Today, as well as being fun and a quick way to communicate, emoji’s are an important way to make internet more inclusive and diverse. Recent additions to the emoji vocabulary mean that while not everyone understands the same language, everyone can understand an icon, meaning emoji is a language we all speak.
What are your thoughts on emojis? Do you love them or hate them, do you have a favourite or is there an emoji you would like to see developed? Let me know in the comments.
Sources
- World Emoji Day
- App Institute: The Illustrated History of Emojis
- Etymology Online: Emoji
- Etymology: Emoticon
- MOMA: The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita
- NBC News: Apple announces ‘disability-themed emojis’
- Sky: The History of Emojis
- WIRED: The WIRED Guide to Emoji
Further information
- Emojipedia: Home of emoji meanings
- The Royal Society Of Edinburgh: A History of Emojis
- Unicode Emoji: Guidelines for Submitting Unicode Emoji Proposals
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