The Emoji Code

Mandarin (900 million) and Spanish (427 million) have more native speakers – it has both status and reach that puts it on a different plane to any other. English has 339 million native speakers, with a further 603 million speakers who use it as a second language. This means there are around 942 million more-or-less fluent speakers in the world. And with another 500-plus million users with some degree of fluency, that makes for more than 1.5 billion people alive today with proficiency in English.

Emoji facts, figures and cross-platform glyphs is emojipedia.org

Since 2011, when they first became widely available on mobile computing devices, they have taken the world by storm

Ken Hale, a visual designer with a passion for Emoji, has translated, among other classics, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, a book of 27,500 or so words, into a pictorial narrative consisting of around 25,000 emojis

In one question, Ms Bishop was asked to provide her emoji characterisations of various world leaders. Intriguingly, she identified the then Australian prime minister Tony Abbott as the running man, while Russian president Vladimir Putin was characterised as the angry red face.2

In February 2015, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Julie Bishop, an avid Emoji user, conducted the world’s first political interview entirely in Emoji – the interview was conducted via iMessage and published on the Buzzfeed website

Emojis, for instance, are often repeated, adding emphasis by visual repetition. But what sane individual repeats the same English phrase over and over? A line of red hearts intuitively works, making the point clear. But I love you, the English expression, is more powerful when uttered or written just once. With undue repetition, it can come to seem insincere. Just as with the forced writing of lines by a punished schoolchild, the laborious begets boredom.

They became available as standard with Windows 8 in 2012, but didn’t receive full functionality across all internet browsers until Windows 10 in 2015. And on Android operating systems, which are used by the world’s biggest-selling smartphone manufacturer, Samsung, they were not standard until 2013. But 2015 seemed to be the year that Emoji made the leap from some bizarre, little-known adolescent joke, to a bona fide means of communicating with our nearest and dearest, expressing something more than what could be achieved with digital text alone. By the end of 2015, Emoji even received institutional respectability – of sorts – being endorsed by Oxford University Press: an emoji, no less, was named as Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year. Emoji could no longer be pigeon-holed as an amusing irrelevance, a passing fad; Emoji had gone mainstream!

As I began to investigate, I quickly discovered that emojis were a very recent phenomenon. It was only in 2011 that they were introduced as standard on the Apple electronic keyboard, on iPhones and iPads.

I spent the rest of the afternoon reflecting on the phenomenon of Emoji. I thought about the emojis I used, safe in my comfort zone, the boring ones: the wink, smile and, sometimes, a sad face. Before then, I’d never thought much about whether there were other emojis, or even where they came from. I tried to recall when I had first become aware of them. I struggled. One day they just seemed to be there, all at once, as if they had been dropped out of the sky and into our smartphones. Today emojis really do seem to be everywhere. But back in early 2015, people were just starting to use them in numbers. And I had to admit it, I didn’t have a clue what some of them were supposed to convey. For instance, what did that one of the dancing twin girls with bunny ears mean?