👋!

Emojis may seem like a strange topic for linguistic analysis, but they have a lot to offer when studying languages.

Emojis can exhibit the feature of human language called polysemy. Polysemy is when a word has multiple meanings, like play, bank, and run. The goat emoji 🐐 can represent a literal goat or the acronym G.O.A.T. (Greatest Of All Time)

While most emojis do not change their semantic meaning, as seen in a 2021 study, some undergo big shifts. For instance, the “Skull” emoji 💀 has changed from a symbol of literal dying to a symbol of figurative dying from “extreme laughter, frustration, or affection.”

What’s the purpose of emojis? Are they going to overtake all languages as some people suggest? 😱

Hardly. People use hand gestures when speaking to emphasize or alter what they actually mean, which is why language is called multi-modal. Similarly, emojis help add tone to otherwise ambiguous text messages. While you may substitute an emoji for an actual word (like ☀️ instead of typing “sun”), emojis will currently never replace language. As linguist Neil Cohn points out in his article, emojis lack important linguistic aspects like grammar and flexibility (new words would become annoyingly long strings of emojis since you can’t combine them like we do in natural languages).

Although emojis don’t have grammar, grammar structures from natural languages are reflected in emoji use (even if we don’t realize it). When you want to show someone eating a carrot, you might put: 😋🥕. Strings of emojis typically place the subject before the object since most languages have the subject before the verb and object.

Fun fact: 😂 (Face with Tears of Joy) is the most popular emoji, accounting for almost 20% of all emoji usage in the United States and the UK. It even became the Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year in 2015 🤯.

See you later alligator! 🐊

Read more:

Robertson, A., Liza, F. F., Nguyen, D., McGillivray, B., & Hale, S. A. (2021). Semantic Journeys: Quantifying Change in Emoji Meaning from 2012-2018. Available from: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2105.00846.

Robertson, A., Liza, F. F., Nguyen, D., McGillivray, B., & Hale, S. A. (2021). “Emoji are even more like language than previously thought.” The Alan Turing Institute. May 17 2021. Available from: https://www.turing.ac.uk/blog/emoji-are-even-more-language-previously-thought.

Cohn, Neil. “Will emoji become a new language?” BBC. October 13 2015. Available from: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151012-will-emoji-become-a-new-language.