Emojis have become part of our day-to-day lives and a common feature of our digital communications. But can we actually consider emojis a language? In Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, author Keith Houston explores this very question. He points out how the Face With Tears of Joy emoji was chosen as Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year in 2015 — the first time a pictograph had been selected for the honor. At the time, Caspar Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, explained the choice by saying that “emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders.” But where exactly do these borders lie when it comes to emojis — and can they be seen as a language in their own right?
Houston takes a deep dive into the subject and, after considering various studies, notes that most experts “hesitate to deem emoji a language.” He highlights some key areas in which emojis differ from formal language: “Inasmuch as there are grammatical rules for emoji,” he writes, “the scholarly consensus is that they are implicit, not formal; that they are limited, not exhaustive; and that they are variegated, not universal.”
So, it’s hard to call emojis a language. What, then, can we call them? One option, according to Houston, is to think of them as a script — as the written expression of a spoken language, rather than a language itself. This could place emojis alongside writing systems such as cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and Chinese characters. However, these examples are tied to specific spoken languages, while emojis are universal and capable of being interpreted in myriad ways.
Emojis, fundamentally, are iconic rather than symbolic — they represent their pictured object or activity, and while people might interpret the emoji icon in numerous different ways (which in itself is problematic in terms of regarding emojis as a language), it is still just a picture.
Linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne offer an alternative, and very compelling, way of seeing emojis — not as a language, but as digital gestures. They note how most emojis are used to augment the meaning of the words they accompany — and in this sense, emojis act as the body language of the web. So, a language of sorts, but not — at least yet — any kind of formal, recognized language in the true sense of the word.
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