Emoji Language

We live in a modern time where we can communicate with each other in a quick and convenient manner through text. Texting your friends or family to meet up or commenting on the internet have become a regular thing in everyone’s everyday lives. But here’s the thing: typing out all words exactly can be a bit tedious and you can easily mistype longer words, and when on the go you don’t really have a whole bunch of time to express yourself eloquently. Not only that, but the internet connects people from all corners of the world in one place, and with differences in dialects it can sometimes be difficult to understand each other.

History of emoji language

Digital communication through text and its problems have been a thing in people’s lives for a long time - even before the apocalypse. And even then, people have started to come up with ways to make text communication easier and more efficient.

Back then things started by shortening words (eg: srsly insead of seriously), shortening whole phrases (eg: lol for laughing out loud) and use of simple punctuation based smiley faces (eg: :) for a happy face)

As time went on and technology advanced, more words and phrases became commonly shortened and emojis in the form of pictures became a standard staple of every messaging application. More and more different emojis were being added, and they could be used to simply replace words, or even whole sentences. They spread from only being simple symbols to represent emotions to icons representing everything from food, plants, animals, to objects, flags and even abstract concepts.

Emoji language in our world

When we started rebuilding our civilization, all of the old technologies and conventions surrounding emojis and textspeak were already in place, and people of our world continued to use them.

But as time went on, our people have slowly brought this to the next level. The array of available emojis and things they could express grew bigger and bigger each day. Inevitably, we reached the point where you could write entire messages with nothing but emojis and punctuation marks. Use of emojis has become so widespread it turned into a whole language of its own.

Rules?

Of course, use of emojis became not only widespread, but also a little bit chaotic. Different people used different emojis differently, and different apps used emojis that could look completely different from each other. What might look like a friendly emoji on one app, could look different on the other one. These differences would happen even between different devices, leading to a number of weird misunderstandings between people. Because of all this, some standard system became necessary.

First step was to standardize the appearance of all of the emojis. While style remained different on different services, they all had to look similar enough in appearance, so there would be no confusion about what emotion they represent. Dictionaries began to pop up, explaining in detail how each emoji should look like, what exactly they represent and how they can or should be used.

But of course, by now it wasn’t just about cramming together different emojis that at least approximately represent what emotion you’re trying to convey. The most passionate linguists came together to come up with an exact set of grammatical rules on how to use emojis, to convey your message quickly, efficiently and precisely as possible.

Oh, this is very serious now

Yes, most people still use emojis on a regular basis only to slap a :) at the end or their message to say they’re happy, or a O_O to say they’re surprised or confused, but emoji language is right now a very real language that you can learn and master.

There are full language courses out there to teach you all of the exact meanings and rules of how to use emojis. There is tons of literature in the emoji language - go ahead, try to look up your favorite book, surely it has been translated to emoji language by now. Not only that, but there are books out there originally written in this language. The language has also become very popular on the internet, where more and more content is written entirely in emoji language.

There still are members of the older generation who complain about the young folks who can’t even read and write anymore, but the truth is they’re just mad because they aren’t able to understand emoji language. Reading, writing and speaking a proper language is still very much required if you want to function normally in the world, but emojis are something that have been around for millennia, and have been a proper language for generations now, so it’s about time we all move forward to the future. Nevertheless, it’s still funny when the older generations shame the younger ones for not knowing what “7777-33-66-3 66-88-3-33-7777” means - a phrase of another texting language now lost to time; but more on that one in another article.

The use of emoji language

We wouldn’t be surprised if some visitor from some other world of this multiverse would see this as some sort of a joke, but we can assure you that there is a good reason why emoji language has become so popular and widespread.

You see, our world does have a unified official language, one that is generally spoken and understood all over the world. It may be used in things like legal documents, books, it is spoken in the news or in big public events, or other things that need to be seen and understood by the entire world, or at least a significant part of it. It’s also great to know that you can go anywhere in the world, and there's a language that will be understood wherever you go. But this language is considered very formal and proper, not something that people will actually speak in their everyday lives. Over time people have developed local dialects that can by now sound completely different from each other. Travel from Fairy Gardens to Wasteland of T@Ö#Ä3, and you’ll be lucky to understand what people there are saying.

But, in our modern era, the world is connected more than ever through the internet. You don’t actually have to travel all the way From Fairy Gardens to Wasteland to talk to someone from there, and the internet is full of people from all of the different regions of the world, used to talking all sorts of dialects in their everyday lives. Sure, the official language of our world is always a good option, but as we already said, it’s too formal and rigid, and not very appropriate for everyday conversations, especially on the internet where people come for a fun chit chat. Because of this, emoji language is the best and most obvious choice for communication on the internet. It’s not based on specific words and grammatical quirks that many dialects have, but it’s very concrete and straightforward. There’s like 100 different words for “happy” in 100 different dialects, but everyone will know immediately what :) means.

Of course, sure, emoji language has its own rules and quirks and you do have to study it to master it, but at the end of the day it is the easiest to understand and the quickest to type. Especially younger generations who use the internet on a daily basis and have grown up in this internet culture tend to pick it up pretty quickly and are perfectly fluent in it. With its prevalent use on the internet today, it has actually become the official language of the internet.

Some examples of how emoji language can be used:

Examples of emoji language use

More specific uses of emoji language

And here's a little short about a whole book written entirely in emoji language:
This Book Has No Words - YouTube