Last time out, I got into why emoji don’t really qualify as a language. But I wouldn’t say the concept is totally inconceivable. Emoji are something I could imagine turning into a full written language someday, if they accumulate enough agreed-upon meanings.
The past-tense problem, for instance, could be resolved by some combination of arrow and clock imagery. And the iconography of Spider-Man shows how some non-visual concepts can attain visual signifiers: one could emojify the image below to signify “I’m tingling” or “I’m in danger.”
And there is a sign that emoji are moving more in the direction of a language: they have overall become more standardized.
It used to be that the major platforms could differ wildly in the usage of even the simplest emoji. Many thanks to Emojipedia for its research on this issue, producing the graph below:
Apple’s “smiling emoji” used to look kind of pained, Google’s was more branded to Android, and Microsoft’s (and then briefly Samsung’s) just looked kind of weird. But since 2018 or so, smiles have become more recognizable cross-platform.
Nowadays? Well, check out this video to see how those platforms compared in 2021. Even Big Tech has learned that trying to “brand” their emoji tends to annoy users too much to be a worthwhile investment.
There are still some distinctions. Google’s “I’m cold” emoji uses snowflakes as well as icicles, and in that category, Apple and Google use symmetrical grimaces instead of more traditional frowns. (Oddly, Apple’s “I’m cold” grimace looks a lot like its “I’m happy” grimace used to, which seems like a mea culpa on Apple’s part. “You thought our old design looked like it was in pain? Okay, we’ll start using it to mean ‘pain,’ then.”)
Google and Microsoft’s spiral-eyes do a better job of rendering dizziness than Apple and Samsung’s X-eyes, which I tend to associate more with death.
Overall, Microsoft is the most distinct of the major platforms, with a red devil instead of a purple one, a nerd face with glasses taped together, a “money-crazed” emoji with a dollar bill tongue, and heavy black contours all over everything. It seems a bit more “American” overall, closer to the Cal Arts style than to anime. But all in all, these are minor details compared to what we were facing in 2013.
There’s similar uniformity on other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, as seen in this study from 2022.
Dang, looks like those “dizzy” X-eyes are catching on, aren’t they? Well, the language as spoken isn’t always gonna follow my personal taste, so I guess that’s also true of the emoji as seen.
If centennials’ grandkids do end up using emoji as a new kind of written word, this interoperability will be a step in the development that got us there.