WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

Hieroglyphs at Our Fingertips

Language, Semiotics, and Communication through Emoji

Claire-Marie Brisson

French 6991

Dr. Giordano

23 April 2015

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Claire-Marie Brisson

French 6991

Dr. Giordano

23 April 2015

I. Emoji as Language: Origins, Definitions, and Implications

At a bustling campus café, students scatter themselves at steel-topped tables. Amidst the

din of conversation, the tapping of keys, and the groan of a coffee grinder, the majority of

students are perpetually connected to their cell phones. Observable reactions to text messages

received spread across their faces: some look concerned, others smile. But how are so many

emotions shared between others in so few characters? Enter the popular emergence of the emoji,

sometimes referred to as smiley faces. Cell phones and tablets are equipped with an enormous

variety of images on a separate emoji keyboard – “roughly eight hundred of them—smiley face,

broken heart, flamenco dancer, snail—though the most commonly used emoji [can be

consolidated to around] six hundred or so special characters” (Morais 1). These images are then

shared within text messages, embedded onto photos, or shared on social media platforms. Some

communication platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, are compatible with the emoji

keyboard, and have also expanded to brand their own, ever-expanding version called Facebook

Stickers. Though some might find these forms of communication to be unprofessional or

childish, it is becoming a normalized standard of communication.

Developed among a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon by way of a joke in 1982,

the smiley face was first invented to prevent miscommunication. “Trading quips on an online

bulletin board about what might happen if their building’s elevator cable were cut,” the team of

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researchers soon realized “how easily the conversation could be misconstrued” (Garber 1). Scott

Fahlman, a researcher from the group, soon developed a way to add emotion – specifically

sarcasm – to the string of messages by recreating a human face using pre-existing symbols: :-).

The smiley face was born. This would be the most important revolution in technological

communication, though its idea paralleled generations of writers who had previously sought to

express their emotion – and most importantly, their sarcasm – in a meaningful way through

written language.

In the late 1800s, the poet Alcanter de Brahm proposed a point d’ironie resembling a

backward question mark—a suggestion echoed, a century later, by the novelist Hervé

Bazin. Nabokov wanted “a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave

mark, a supine round bracket.” Ambrose Bierce offered the “snigger point” (a horizontal

parenthesis, or “”) to punctuate “every jocular or ironical sentence.” (Garber 2)

Though many scholars may disregard emoji as immature or irrelevant, this system may have

made its debut several centuries earlier, if ideas such as these had been as well-received.

Once Fahlman’s idea began to become popular with users in online forums and chat

rooms, multiple forms of the smiley face developed beyond its original conception. Soon, other

emotions such as sadness :-(, laughter :-D, silliness :-P, uncertainty :-S, and disappointment :-/

began to appear as users discovered that the smiley faces allowed for the addition of extra

emphasis, emotion, or meaning beyond the written word. Eventually, cultural norms and

keyboard layouts caused the smiley face to further develop and expand. For example, speakers

who used a Cyrillic keyboard where “the colon and semicolon are located very inconveniently,”

began to omit the colon and dash from the smiley face, leaving only a repetition of several

parentheses, producing the greeting привет))) instead of hello :-) (Ars Technica). The same is

true with users whose language writes from right to left; in these cases, the smiley was

reformatted to conform with the order of the direction of their writing: (-:.

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Among the many cultural influences that germinated from the original smiley face,

undoubtedly the most important changes began in Japan, the birthplace of the emoji. Instead of

continuing with Fahlman’s sideways smiley face, Japanese users preferred to connote ideas with

emoticons that could be read simultaneously with text. The Japanese smiley faces, called

kaomoji and written ^_^, also allowed the user to embellish and eventually add on other symbols

to portray physical motions or represent other objects, such as flowers or animals. A clear

example can be seen in this representation of a person bowing, following the cultural custom

where the eyes are lowered to the ground, and the arms extended: (シ_ _)シ.

In the mid-90s, standardization of these groups of symbols was sought as mobile

communication’s development was in its infancy. At the time, Shigetaka Kurita had been

working on a mobile communication network which would function as the prototype for modern

cellular communications, and he soon realized that “the lack of visual cues made the service

more difficult to use than it ought to be,” positing that users would “benefit majorly from some

extra characters to show contextual information” (Blagdon 2). Since Japanese relies so strongly

on contextual cues and tonality, Kurita found it necessary to distinguish between greetings and

the emphasis the writer wished to place on them. The most efficient solution to the problem,

instead of typing the complex combinations of kaomoji would be to develop a standardized set of

emotions into pictorial images: emoji.

Emoji, literally translating to “picture letter in Japanese” is an elaborate system of codes

where “each character has an official name, defined as part of the Unicode standard”

(Emojipedia 1). Unicode assigns a number to every character found on a computing system,

whether it be as simple as the letter A, the Cyrillic letter Д, the business symbol ™, or an emoji

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such as ☺. Acting as “an international encoding standard for use with different languages and

scripts,” Unicode provides the means for computers, tablets, and cell phones to run from a

standard code set that all devices can interpret and encode to display properly to the receiver

(Pearsall). Though standard codification of written symbols may seem like a modern concept, the

standardization of codes across computer platforms bears a resemblance to “the efforts of Louis

the XIV to standardize typographic forms through the commissioning of the ‘roman du roi’

typeface” which “embod[ied] the authority of the scientific method and bureaucratic power” of

the time (Lebduska 3). The difference is that instead of regimenting a shared language, the

creation of a standard set of emojis introduced a new medium of communication presented to

users in the hopes of accessibility.

The “playful manipulation of symbols and characters” allows for an “infus[ion of] the

text with sentiment pictorially” that otherwise would not be present within the text (Fisch 139;

141). As is noted in the analysis of the work Densha otoko, a Japanese text that relies on emoji to

add emphasis and emotion:

While all text functions via a graphic element, the inability in the majority of instances to

align the symbols with a phonetic register or to apprehend decisively their meaning

confines them as an event to the surface of interface and a visual economy […] Overall,

what emerges is a display of indulgence in the possibilities of the medium and its

transformative powers. (Fisch 141)

Whereas traditional print texts contain certain codified language, decipherable by the interpretant

who possesses knowledge of the code – that is, language – emoji allows for another level of

interpretation.

Though semiotics regularly analyzes codes in their narrative and visual functions, it is

essential to examine the recent reappearance of the image as text. As was vital to language

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systems such as hieroglyphs, as well as in the import of images upon the written word in

emblematic literature of the Renaissance, pictorial representations have become the means by

which emotions are conveyed in otherwise sparse text messages and social media posts. It is both

timely and necessary, then to examine and explain this new symbolic language by recourse to

theories of semiotics and communication.

II. The Semiotics of Emoji

“Men might just as well have chosen gestures and used visual symbols instead of

acoustical symbols,” postulated Ferdinand de Saussure in his famous Course in General

Linguistics at the beginning of the twentieth century (Saussure 10). Little would he have known

that nearly a century later, visual symbols would be used in conjunction with, as well as

independently of, written texts. To better understand the basis of signification and

communication as related to emoji, “it is necessary to single out the elementary structure of

communication at the point where communication may be seen in its most elementary terms”

(Eco 32). To do this, the elements of semiology that comprise the emoji system will be

considered following the theories of Saussure, Jakobson, Barthes, Eco, and other semioticians.

Emoji are categorized into several groupings: people, nature, food and drink,

celebrations, activities, travel and places, objects, symbols, and flags (examples, see Figure 1, p.

14). Each emoji is similar to a logograph, as they can represent a singular word or morpheme,

such as ‘pigeon’ ( ). However, what differentiates the emoji from a traditional logograph,

such as the @ symbol, is that one image can be representative of multiple emotional reactions

that would naturally be displayed by a face, such as: , ,or . These groupings of

emoji could be defined as a pure langue in Saussurean terms, going even beyond the system of

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rules of a langue that is representative of acoustical speech symbols. The emoji langue instead

provides “a nomenclature for a set of universal concepts” making it easily understandable “from

one language to another” (Culler 31).

When transmitting messages between a sender and receiver or multiple receivers using

emoji, there exists no system of rules to govern where to place an emoji within a sentence or

fragment. There equally are no limits as to how many emojis may be sent at a time, giving users

the option to use emoji sparsely or repeatedly. After interviewing around 25 individuals between

the ages of 18 and 65, the majority of responses indicated that emoji could be placed anywhere

within a text, even to the extent of replacing textual words with an emoji. Several responded that

they either initiated or ended conversations using a smiley face in lieu of physical reactions that

they might make in person, such as smiling or waving. Equally, some users reported that strings

of emoji were sent between sender and receiver when emotion alone was meant to be shared

(Brisson 2015). Therefore, the parole related to emoji points to an unrestricted set of images

allowing for infinite combinations, involving “both the combinations by which the speaker uses

the code of the [emoji] system in order to express” his or her thoughts or emotions (Culler 40). In

separating the langue from the parole of the emoji, it is clear to see that the langue points to a

shared set of emotions and objects common to human existence regardless of language, whereas

the parole allows for authorial intention – that is, individual personalization based upon what the

user wished to express. This is why the emoji a user chooses can sometimes elicit a semiotic

misinterpretation between users, since emotions tend to be subjective.

In contrast to written text, the use of emoji consolidates Saussure’s concepts of the

signifier and the signified into one image. In written language, if a user were to write the word

“dog,” the concept of a dog will be evoked in the reader’s mind. This relationship between a

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signifier (“dog”) and a signified concept (an actual dog) therefore could elicit an unlimited

number of signifieds of dogs, regardless of breed, age, or other traits. Conversely, emoji begins

with an image of a combined signifier and signified, and instead transmits an image of a dog

from one user to another: . What is different in this method of communication is the

hightened importance placed upon the interpretant who must decode the emoji’s meaning. Left

on its own, the emoji symbol for dog received in a text message might imply an array of

implications; for example – did the person who sent this image buy a new dog? does this image

stand in for the word ‘woof?’ is the user walking their dog as they send this message? What

becomes more esoteric for the interpretant to decode is when another user sends a smiley face

representing an emotion with no context. As an example, if one user were to send another user

the emoji, the interpretant would “enable thought to be productive of new meanings” of

what the emoji’s implications might be (Werthmann 1). For example: is the user sad? what

might be the matter? why did the sender of this message send a sad looking emoji?

Defining the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of the emoji set also helps to clarify, as

well as explore, the possible combinations between symbols and meaning. Guess the Emoji, a

recent mobile game which tests the user’s capability to decode a string of emoji that represent

popular song lyrics, quotes, or phrases, shows how linked combinations of images can produce

deeper meaning. (As an example, would represent “corndog,” the food item.)

The paradigmatic axis of the emoji set includes all possible signs of emoji, where the user

can choose either one or multiple images to create a more advanced meaning, with emoji sharing

a similar structure across platforms. The paradigmatic axis of emoji allows for the user to choose

one symbol, or several symbols to add or modify meaning. Equally, the emoji set offers several

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similar images, whose meaning is identical to or fairly the same as one another. For example,

there exists six ways to smile, three ways to wink, six ways to kiss, and twenty-four ways to

express disappointment or sadness.

The syntagmatic axis of emoji enables the user to convey more than one shade of

meaning from combinations of emoji sets, using the image to replace a textual word or phrase, as

previously mentioned. Differing from transferring one written word or phrase within a text

message exchange – for example, replacing the phrase “I’m feeling sad,” as versus simply

sending the emoji – often misconstrues meaning, as would an incomplete or vague fragment

of text. Though emoji have an inherent narrative, that is, their images define certain feelings or

objects, solidifying a consistent definition of each emoji is difficult since emotions tend to be so

subjective. Therein is one of the weaknesses of the emoji in transmitting emotions from one user

to another. This explains why emoji are commonly combined with at least one textual morpheme

when establishing the subject of a conversation to add tonal effect.

When considering the syntagmatic axis of emoji, it is also essential to note that “a culture

has a characteristic semiotic style whose crucial characteristics are reflected in all systems of

communication, whether verbal or nonverbal” (Hasan 353). As emoji are indeed a system of

communication, certain cultures are semiotically more prone to use certain emoji to either add to

or replace vocabulary words. In a report collected by SwiftKey, an application added to cell

phones and tablets to increase a user’s productivity when typing on mobile devices by swiping

their finger across the keyboard instead of manually pushing each individual letter, an analysis

that included “1 billion pieces of emoji data taken from communications made in 16 different

languages” made significant findings (Stout). Though “the frequency of any individual emoji is

often small” given that there are so many emoji figures, the data highlights certain cultural

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tendencies that may highlight tonality and perceptions rarely observable through text alone

(SwiftKey 1). In what it considers noteworthy findings from the data, SwiftKey reports that:

Canadians score highest in emoji categories some may consider to be more American

(money, raunchy, violent, sports); French use four times as many heart emoji than other

languages, and it’s the only language for which a ‘smiley’ is not [number] 1; flowers and

plants emoji are used at more than [four times] the average rate by Arabic speakers;

Russian speakers use three times as much romantic emoji than the average; Australia’s

emoji use characterizes it as the land of vice & indulgence, using double the average

amount of alcohol-themed emoji, 65% more drug emoji than average and leading for both

junk food and holiday emoji; Americans lead for a random assortment of emoji [and

other various] categories, including skulls, birthday cake, fire, tech, LGBT, meat and

female-oriented emoji. [… When conveying sentiment, all] languages [convey sentiments

that] are more positive than negative (in relation to emoji use), [with] French [being] the

most positive with 86% positive [and] US Spanish speakers [being] the most negative at

22% negative. (SwiftKey 1; 5)

Therefore, emoji is inherently linked to an important cultural classification system that Roland

Barthes identified as “the gnomic, or cultural code which evokes a particular body of knowledge”

(Compultense 4). Just as clichés and cultural norms in speech, the choice in emoji and its cultural

function has an incontestable tie to culturally defined conventions. As an example, certain hand

gestures available on the emoji keyboard, such as the open-circle hand gesture, commonly

defined as OK by American English speakers – – has a different meaning “in Brazil,

Germany, Russia, and many other countries around the world, [where the] OK sign is a very

offensive gesture” and therefore would be defined differently based on its cultural gnomic code

(Cotton). This is equally true with any of the hand gestures that point with the index finger –

– which is considered discourteous in “China, Japan, Indonesia, Latin America, and many

other countries. In Europe, it's thought of as impolite, and in many African countries the index

finger is used only for pointing at inanimate objects, never at people” (Cotton). It is important,

therefore, not to assume that every culture will decode emoji in the same way. Consequently, one

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could define emoji as a syntagm with an inherent narrative, relative to cultures and subjective

emotions.

III. Applied Analysis of Emoji

Consider the following conversation that hypothetically could be shared between two

individuals engaging in an exchange of text messages. The register of this conversation is

identifiable as an informal interchange between two

speakers of US English who share a personal friendship.

User A will define the messages to the left of the screen,

in white; User B will define the messages to the right of

the screen, in green. In the first line, the emoji was

used as an initiator of a conversation, probing User B

(the interpretant) to respond with both an emoji to

convey a tone for the following textual exchange.

Devoid of the emoji in this case, User B’s reply would

come across as cold and curt to User A. User A’s

conversation then continues with yet another use of an

emoji – – reemphasizing the first emoji message. As the parole of the emoji set allows for the

user to create infinite combinations of images, User A’s combination of and indicates a

similarity in tone, that of sadness, however more specifically implies that something wrong and

the user is irritated. User B’s reaction relates directly to C.S. Peirce’s theory of a tripartite

semiotic relationship between an object, a representamen, and the interpretant. In this case, the

combination of images sent by User A function as the representamen, and the various

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implications and definitions related to the images make up the object. The interpretant’s

heightened function in decoding the emoji makes the interpretation of meaning very productive.

As User B showed, the first two responses were questions linked to User A’s semiotic message.

User B responded productively with questions related to the emoji – “What’s wrong?” and “Oh

no, did something happen today at work?” – two ideas that were implied through the subjective

logic and rational deductive reasoning of User B. It is of equal importance to note that User B

does not simply produce in textual terms; rather, User B’s replies respond with visual emotion,

just as in face-to-face conversations. The binary relationships between sadness, frustration,

surprise, and concern converge between Lines 1 and 4. The visual replies through emoji express

evident concern in regards to User A’s cryptic messages.

Line five of the dialogue is the crux of the conversation, as it brings the narrative to life

through text and images. User A describes the situation with a combination of words and images

that aims to recreate and provide visual cues as to the incident that caused the first emoji

exchange. The combination of emoji in this line in a way recreates the story in images,

and at the same time allows User B to imagine and envision User A in the situation. Though the

emoji’s purpose in this line is to give visual cues to the situation within the message, User B may

also have an easier time replacing the emoji car with User A’s real car and might envision User

A making a similar expression while expressing his frustration with his car breaking down, and

consequently being late for work.

Line 6, the response from User B, acts as a phatic function, acknowledging solidarity

through the use of another surprised emoji face and finishing the sentence with a thumbs up,

giving a tone of reassurance to User A. Lines 7 and 8 consequently change in tone entirely, and a

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more positive outcome ends with User B using repetition to acknowledge support and make

visual reference to their togetherness.

Emoji enabled both User A and User B to recreate several layers of signification that

would be present in a face-to-face conversation by being able to express their facial expressions,

use gestures, and even incorporate objects into their conversation. Furthermore, the presence of

emoji allowed for a more natural progression of the conversation between both parties. If the

ability to use emoji were removed from the scenario, User A and User B’s exchange would have

lacked the same emotions evoked in lines 1 through 5 in expressing the narrative, and instead

User A would have had to reinvent a way to add suspense through a text message, which may

not have transferred as easily and efficiently as through the use of emoji.

It of equal importance to note that a preferred reading of the emoji existed in the

interchange between Users A and B. A nearly seamless transfer of emotions and ideas were

exchanged in conversation, as they would have been had Users A and B been communicating

face-to-face. The emoji act as a palimpsest, where an intersection between cultural conventions

and a modern form of communication collide. Since both users were writing within the US

English register, the reactions and hand gestures were easily interpreted from user to user.

However, if one of the users had been replaced by a native German speaker speaking through an

acquired English register, some cultural cues, facial expressions, and hand gestures may have

been misinterpreted. The possibility of this kind of misinterpretation serves as one of the

shortcomings of the emoji code when thought of as the first internationally understood

‘language.’

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IV. Conclusions

The possibilities that stem from the combinations of signification using emoji in text

messages, social media posts, and e-mails have evolved far beyond the intent of Scott Fahlman’s

original :-) invented for use between his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon. In a response to the

progression to the emoji system of codes, Fahlman is quoted by the Huffington Post as saying: “I

think they are ugly, and they ruin the challenge of trying to come up with a clever way to express

emotions using standard keyboard characters. But perhaps that's just because I invented the other

kind” (Fahlman). Whether emoji are uninventive or genius, their use as a new system of codes

that aims to augment language’s emphasis on tone and visual vocabulary is undeniable.

For that reason, the analysis and interpretation of emoji as language is a timely inquiry

into the ever-evolving and expansive world of communication and signification. Converse to the

function of words, which start with a signifier (the word to describe an object, such as “tree”) to

imply a signified (an actual tree), emoji allows the user to begin with a set image shared between

the sender and receiver, implying a word, feeling, or concept of a tangible object. Furthermore,

emoji allow the user more possibilities than text alone to choose from a varied set of emotions,

use repetition for emphasis, and recreate meanings by varying groupings of emoji. As there

exists no rule governing the structure of emoji within messages, the ability to fluidly convey tone

and emotion through messages becomes heightened. In the years to come, as emoji’s use

becomes increasingly accepted as a common means of communication thanks to technology’s

requirement for a functional emotional code, its importance to identify a larger number of objects

and emotions will be an eventual progression and expansion on the current code set.

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Annex of Figures

Figure 1: Sample of several categories of emoji.

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