Are emojis the new global language, do you have emoji intelligence?
Nona Walia
Emojis have taken over the world. Craving for a pizza 🍕, send an emoji to your friend; angry with someone, try this 😡. On World Emoji Day (July 2020), actor Shilpa Shetty to tv star Aparna Dixit enacted their favourite emoji. There are 3.2 billion internet users worldwide and according to a source, 92 per cent of them regularly use emojis.
In this pandemic when words fail us, emojis express our emotions. You’re trying to end an awkward midnight text exchange: an emoji works better than any words. Linguistics professor Vyvyan Evans, author of The Emoji Code, he writes, emoji is an evolutionary response to rapid mobile communications, much as punctuation helped ease the transition from oral to written traditions. Almost all of the most popular emoji are emotional. Tears of joy — the Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2015 — has racked up 1,705,847,010 uses. Heart, heart eyes, floods of tears, kiss and slight dejection also score high.
According to Psychology Today, emojis give informative clues in understanding ourselves and others.These days even personal wars are fought with emojis. The rise of emojis has left the world lost for words. A study reports women overload their text with emojis. In the 2020 emoji rulebook, Less is more. Emojis have broken all rules of grammar and words of English. The millennials use emojis to express all their emotional needs. Increasingly emojis are being used in official interactions too. In a WFH situation, emojis replace the facial expression in a communication.Emojis are not seen as dumbing down of conversations. Rather, they add humanness and feelings to serious exchange.
Apple’s new 2020 emoji: a ninja, an all-gender sign, a coin, a dodo, and a piñata. There’s also a pair of lungs, as well as an emoji which Unicode has called an “anatomical heart” to differentiate it from the traditional heart emoji. The ease and speed of emoji use has layered appeal. The emoji has had massive success with almost every age group. They are giving emotional comfort in the digital space. Artists have turned to emoji in various ways, some using it as material, as in the case of Yung Jake, who makes portraits of figures such as Breonna Taylor and George Floyd through an assembly of emoji. Then there’s New York artist Tre Reising who has created glittering sculptures of face emojis.Emojis are also the new artwork. Facemoji Keyboard released its 2020 Emoji report outlining the most popular emoji used globally ahead of World Emoji Day. People have definitely felt the stress; the Grinning Face with Sweat emoji ranked No. 7 this year, but was not even in the Top 10 in 2019. The Ring emoji broke the Top 10 in France, proving that Paris truly is the city of love.
Emoji habits can reveal a lot about cultures and psychology. In the pandemic, there’s been a recording of a massive 58 percent increase of microbe emoji, face with a medical mask, folded hands, and face with head-bandage emoji. This reflected the global mood shift. There’s increasing evidence that says, we need to take emojis seriously. They may be serving a range of important psychological and social functions within human communication. A hotel in New York allows customers to request room service by texting emoticons detailing their order.
So how emoji-ful is your life?