Emojis Are Weird (Linguistically Speaking)

You know what emojis are. But what ARE emojis, like, linguistically? Well, here's a brief overview. 🤷

Sources:

Fahlman, S. (1982). "Original Bboard Thread in which :-) was proposed". School of Computer Science. Carnegie Mellon University.

Hand, C.J., Kennedy, A., Filik, R. et al. (2022). "Emoji Identification and Emoji Effects on Sentence Emotionality in ASD-Diagnosed Adults and Neurotypical Controls". Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Kaye, L., Malone, S., & Wall, H. (2017). "Emojis: Insights, affordances, and possibilities for psychological science". Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(2), 66–68.

Miller, H., Thebault-Spieker, J., Chang, S., Johnson, I., Terveen, L., & Hecht, B. (2016). "Blissfully happy or ready to fight: Varying Interpretations of Emoji". GroupLens Research. University of Minnesota.

Sproull, L. & Kiesler, S. (1986). "Reducing Social Context Cues: Electronic Mail in Organizational Communication". Management Science, 32, 1492-1512.

Chapters:
0:00 - Pictograms
3:01 - Ideograms
4:39 - Why Emojis?
6:14 - What are Emojis?
8:02 - Credits

Written and Created by Me
Art by kvd102
Music by Me

Thanks to my patrons!!

Translations:
@miaudelief - Dutch
James Morris-Wyatt - Spanish
@dip - Catalan
Le Napolitain - French

#emojis #AtlasVPN #bestvpn

[kklein]

in other news, what did you think of the video?

[eoghan.]

I think the 💀 emoji is a good example of how an emoji can have a meaning which is readily understood by people familiar with its use on social media, but is quite difficult to succinctly define in words

[sinom]

Another thing going against emoji being their own language is that they can mean something completely different depending on the language they're used in.
The best example being 💦.
In Japanese that means panic, hurry, anxiety etc.
In English it usually means something a lot more nsfw

[sz]

Chinese speaker here, characters at 3:35 say “I love linguistics”. Nice easter egg.

[averynhiell]

As an autistic person, I find emojis extremely helpful for disambiguation. I tend to take things literally or at least be very unsure if the other person is joking or not (or regarding subtler things like their mood), even in contexts where it might be clear for neurotypicals. And often, I have too much anxiety to ask for clarification. When people use emojis, it makes their intentions significantly clearer for me and reduces a lot of insecurity in interactions. Also, when I write myself, I consciously use emojis to neutralise my sometimes rather frank wording. Thank you for addressing autistic people’s relationship with emojis (also quite respectfully) in your otherwise also very interesting video! Just wanted to add this aspect to what you said. (:

[CommonCommiestudios]

Guys, we all know that emoticons are still the superior way of expressing emotions over the internet, forget emojis

[heynyquildriver]

thank you for talking about autistic peoples difficulties w/ emojis. i’m autistic and although i’m maybe more socially adept than a neurotypical persons idea of an autistic person, i still find myself asking friends what emojis mean in certain situations. great video

[liz]

I find it so interesting how some emojis have lost their "actual" meanings in some situations. 😭 can be crying, but also laughing, being in disbelief, etc.

[halagavi]

This paralinguistic aspect of written language is just like facial expression or gesture while speaking face-to-face. They have different values to different cultures and languages. Oh well, what am I saying 💀🗿🤡🥵🙄😔😴🤮🥰😘👉👈💖👁️👄👁️👍✨🥲🙃👀😭🤭🙈🙏

[elizakeating]

Definitely worth looking into the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. He says some really interesting stuff about the intersection of pictures, icons and language, and the way we emotionally project onto them. One really interesting thing he covers is how the visual symbols for various emotions are completely different in the Japanese manga tradition than in the American comics tradition, and are generally not mutually intelligible unless you get to know them through exposure and context, therefore implying, as you said, that those visual symbols of emotion are ideographic rather than pictographic

[adri]

I love how we just made these emojis 💀😭 to mean laughing

[GreenMojo]

as an autistic person i actually find emojis quite beneficial in online conversations, mainly on discord. there's something very useful about being able to respond with an emoji when you can't think of anything else to add to the conversation. it's also interesting when you're in a server and people respond to a message with emojis and build it up into like a game of getting whatever associated emojis you can get onto the message, even using the letter emojis to spell out words cos for some reason responding with a single word via emojis is more socially acceptable than... just properly responding with the word itself? it's all so fascinating.

been really enjoying the channel & content btw, please keep up the good work! ❤

[ToqTheWise]

I’m an aspiring deaf educator and I’ve noticed Deaf people tend to use emojis more frequently than hearing people. These are also usually people who type like they sign which leads me to believe it has something to do with the nature of sign language. In ASL, facial expressions is far less paralinguistic than in spoken language. It can be thought of like tone or stress. The sign for “late” or “not yet” for example is signed with the tongue between the teeth, as though producing an L. Mostly though it’s used to convey how something is said. Again I think this is because in ASL this is done purely through facial expression and is therefore visualized as such. There are also very deaf specific emojis like 🤟🏻 which literally means “I love you” and is often used as a casual greeting or causal way to apologize. Such as “See you tomorrow! 🤟🏻” or “Oops, didn’t mean it! 😬🤟🏻” Or even more specific to ASL is 💋👊🏻 (kiss fist) which loosely means “I love it” and is taken directly from the signed idiom.

[anglaismoyen]

Related fun fact: Lojban has verbal emojis. You can just tell people what emotion you're feeling or what the intention of your words is using a short word.

[prismarinestars]

Object emojis are very rarely used as literal representations of the object, so they’re basically a whole library of free symbols for people to attach their own meaning to. Currently only a few such as 🗿, 🍑, and 🍆 have received this treatment, but I expect this number to increase with time.

[minefreak]

Anecdotally, another thing to add would be the trend (probably particularly among gen z) over the last few years of using 😭 as a laughing emoji (and, more recently, 💀).

Among young tech-literate regular internet users of my friends (I'm in HS), 😂 is considered antiquated or even outright disrespectful at times. In response to someone saying they accidentally tripped over themselves, for example, responding 😂 conveys laughing *at* them, while 😭 reacts much more lightly to the humorous situation without being disrespectful.

At least with respect to younger generations who've grown up with emoji, they've definitely evolved into arbitrary ideograms rather than being pictographically tied to their concepts.

(Tangentially related is usage of the words "lol" and "lmao" not to indicate laughter but to lighten the overall message, such as "I'm collapsing under the pressure of my studies lmao")

[phineas]

As a person with autism, I have an anecdote you may find interesting.

I went to an elementary school for special needs kids, and I actually had a class there where I was tasked with memorizing which emotion corrisponded to a given facial expression, and the negative ones where always harder for me than the positive ones.

To this day, unless it is super obvious (ex 😈 = mischievous) I still interperate most negative emojies as just sad.

[supremechaosbeing]

the highest form of communication is when i saw someone say
🤓
and someone else responded with
"🤓" 🤓

[RussellTeapot]

2:07 I despise VPNs (or rather I despise the marketing buzzwords used to promote them), but I have to admit: this is probably the most clever segue used to introduce the sponsor of a video I ever heard

[LARAUJO_]

3:36 Interesting. I interpret 🤨 as being either confusion, intrigue, suspicion, or some combination of the three depending on context, since each could be considered "eyebrow-raising" emotions