From a ‘grinning face’ with a good morning text to your Mum, to reacting with a 'thumbs up’ to a message from a colleague, our days often begin and end with emojis. As much of our day-to-day life has shifted online, from dating to working, emojis are increasingly playing a central role in modern-day communication. But with the fear that your wide-grinned emoji could be interpreted as a sign of nervousness by your colleague, can we really rely on these instruments of communication? And what actually causes different interpretations of the exact same emoji? We explain. Why are emojis so popular today? Emojis are “picture characters” that originated on Japanese mobiles phones in the 1990’s, but have become popular worldwide after they were added to other mobile operating systems. Apart from their wide availability, emojis also assist in demonstrating emotions in typed conversations. A 2019 study shows that emoji faces can elicit neural activity that is similar to face-to-face communication. Hence, emojis are often used as a primary tool, sometimes inadvertently, to show empathy and make a person more comfortable. But the messaging platforms have developed over time, and now also include a variety of stickers and gifs. Then why are emojis still favoured by users across the world? Keith Broni, editor-in chief of Emojipedia (an emoji reference website) and the world’s first emoji translator, told The Indian Express that there were three reasons for the popularity of emojis. “Emojis are freely available, within reason, across all devices. Emojis do not require any active effort on part of users like emoticons and unlike stickers and gifs they are directly placed in line with text, so they can punctuate a line better.” Who decides which interpretation of the emoji is the correct one? “We catalogue and observe statistically most normal usage of a certain emoji. Twitter is our primary source of data collection because of its similarity to messaging platform and easy availability of data. It's subject to constant change and the best comparison is with slang where the meaning is constantly changing,” Broni said, while explaining how Emojipedia structures their emoji search engine. Are the emojis the same everywhere? Emojis appear differently on different devices, platforms and operating systems. Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter all have their individual renderings of emojis with slight variations like a misplaced raised eyebrow or an occasional smirk. “Different vendors as we call them (companies which put together their own emojis) design their emojis based on Unicode’s (the standards body for character encoding) recommendations. They own a copyright over it, like Apple, and often want their emoji set to go with the platform aesthetic and be unique to it,” says Broni. “Unicode emoji name is prescriptive as to the exact nature of design. For example, the emoji with a winking eye has the description “smiley with one eye winking and tongue visible”. They are instructive, however there is still room for creative interpretation,” he added. A 2016 study shows that miscommunication within platform communication is due to the “nuance” in emoji design, such as the specific shade of a cheek or a slant of an eyebrow. The graphic nature of emoji affords nuanced expression, but also gives rise to a greater range of interpretation. Which are the most popular? While individual users have different preferences, the report of Emoji Frequency for 2021 released by Unicode Emoji Subcommittee Chair says that the top 100 emojis comprise 82 per cent of total emoji shares. Unicode, in the same report, has found that according to usage “hand and smiley are the most popular while flags are the least popular.” Age, culture and platform usage A recent study by Slack and Duo Lingo on the evolution of emoji usage in the workplace found that younger generations were more likely to report that their recipient misunderstood an emoji that they’d sent (31 percent of Gen Z and 24 percent of millennials). Those surveyed were also more likely to send an emoji to someone their age or younger, while 28 percent of respondents did not care about age when it comes to their emoji use. A 2020 study found that there is a difference in emoji interpretation based on the user's age. older respondents were more likely to interpret emoji literally, while younger respondents favored more abstract, conventionalized functions such as softening and tone modification in communication. “Certain emojis take certain meanings based on the audience of the platform. For example, to use the skull as ‘death by laughing’ can be interpreted correctly on TikTok but maybe misinterpreted on Twitter/ Facebook,” said Broni. “The audience sculpts the meaning of emoji according to the platform somehow and makes a decision to attribute meaning to particular emoji which somehow snowballs with shares and people agree to use it in a certain way. I don’t believe it entirely depends on age though,” he added. What role do cultural settings play in emoji interpretation? Certain emojis evoke varies specific in different cultural setups, and are thus more frequently used in some contexts. A study by Prismoji.com showed that while the red heart was the top emoji used in English,Turkish, German, and Spanish tweets, the crescent moon was the most common emoji in Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi tweets. The study also stated that the crescent moon was more common in non-western languages like Arabic and Farsi, while praying hands were more common in western languages like English and French. This shows the association of different symbols to different meanings in different cultural setups and how it affects emoji interpretation and usage. Emoji additions and trends According to Broni, “nuance is more in focus among the new emojis and how you can emote better using them. Two things in emoji addition at Unicode observed every year are what does the global population use, like the addition of much anticipated plain pink heart in emojis, or filling in cultural gaps, as including the symbol for Sikhism,” he says. He says that emojis continue to be used in largely positive messages and are becoming more important in text communication as they become more habitual every day. “Absence ofemojis is also indicative of a particular tone now, in a conversation in which emojis are generally used,” said Broni, highlighting the importance emojis have now, aiding communication while still leaving room for misinterpretation.
