Say it with emoji as world marks day

Typing an English message online? You have 26 letters of the alphabet to frame it, 14 punctuation marks to enhance it, and 3,521 emoji to dress it.

And that number of emoji is expected to shoot up any time because new ones are added regularly. There is a team based in the United States that meets every week to deliberate on emoji.

Apparently, anyone in the world can propose a new emoji and, if approved through a lengthy process that includes submitting the artwork, it will eventually appear on phones and other devices.

That is how different human race colours of emoji came to be included. That is how some types of food and some countries’ flags came to be included also. Some 334 emojis were added last year: 117 in January and 217 in October.

Going by the frequency of using emojis in online conversations, they are not giggling themselves out of our screens any time soon.

“I think online conversation without emoji would be plain with a lot of misunderstandings,” Ms Irene Onyango, a media liaison officer at Mvita MP Abdullswamad Sheriff’s office, told the Saturday Nation. “Emoji help us understand statements better.”

She added: “I may say something jokingly which, without emoji, would be a problem to understand. Life is just better and sweet with them.”

What started as a small-time initiative to spruce up written messages from the 1990s morphed into early forms of emoji creation in Japan in 2000 that later became a global phenomenon in 2010 when the Unicode Consortium — the organisation that admits new emoji and standardises them — released the first set. They were 722 in number.

Emoji need a lot of computer wizardry to render themselves the way you see them. Even a letter as simple as “I” appears as something more complicated in the back-end of a computer or phone. It is through encoding that it reads as “I” on every device and on any font. 

For every emoji created, a certain code has to be created that a computer will read and display as an emoji to the user, complete with the image it bears. If your gadget doesn’t have the latest code, some emoji render themselves as blank boxes.

Before it got involved in emoji, the Unicode Consortium was preoccupied with rendering different languages into a way that all devices could read.

After years of lobbying from technology players like Google and Apple, it admitted emoji into its areas of focus in 2009 then released the first ever set of 722 emoji in the following year. Now, there is an emoji sub-committee that meets weekly.

“The Unicode Emoji Subcommittee is a subcommittee of the Unicode Technical Committee operating under the Technical Committee Procedures. The current chair is Jennifer Daniel (Google) with vice-chairs Ned Holbrook (Apple), Jennifer Lee (Emojination), and Ken Lunde,” says a message on the Unicode Consortium website.

When emoji went mainstream, the fans of the hitherto-popular emoticons ;-) could have a broader smile because there was a more colourful and vibrant way of packing feelings into a message.

And life has not been the same again. LOL, ROTFL, XOXO, L8R and other famous but sometimes problematic acronyms slowly headed to the back burner as emoji smiled all the way to the pedestal.

Laughing out loud is better captured in an emoji deep in laughter with tears gushing off the eyes. Sadness has a number of emoji to capture it. Anger has even more of those — from the benignly mad emoji to the lid-blowing one. 

Lusting and flirting equally have a plethora of emoji to use, some that were initially meant to be ordinary fruit emoji that adopted a new meaning right before our fingers.

Speaking of fruit, the emoji for the peach fruit took a meaning so perverted that Apple attempted to redesign it in 2016 to eliminate its resemblance with the human anatomy. But there was backlash and The Guardian reports that the efforts were not fruitful. Apple ate humble pie and left the peach as is.

“Only seven per cent of people use the peach emoji as a fruit,” says Emojipedia. As it stands, emoji are an indispensable component of communication.

According to Ms Jacquiline Ondimu, a Moi University lecturer in linguistics, media and communication who has research interest in social media communication, emoji filled a crucial communication gap for humans.

“What digital communication lacks is the use of non-verbal cues such as gestures, facial expressions and body language which add meaning to communication. Emoji come in to fill this gap,” she told the Saturday Nation.

“They add meaning to the text, clarify the message and add an emotions and social intimacy to the otherwise flat message communicated via social media,” she added.

Ms Ondimu noted that much as emoji are useful on one hand, they pose a challenge on the other because people assign different meanings to emoji — and the fact that each digital medium renders them differently.

So, do emoji have a future? Prof Levi Obonyo, the dean of the School of Communication at Daystar University, said it is hard to tell because technology keeps evolving fast.

“Given the speed at which technology changes, you never know how long before a different type of technology comes in,” he said. 

In August last year, an Australian court handling a defamation case confronted the issue of whether the use of a zipped-mouth emoji by a lawyer in a tweet in reference to a politician contributed to the defamatory tone of the message being posted.

As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, the presiding judge referred to Emojipedia, an online dictionary, to derive the meaning of the emoji — which is denotation of “secret” or “stop talking”.

Emojipedia, the platform cited by the judge, is the go-to resource in matters emoji. It, in fact, has a say in the panel that approves new emoji.

“Names (of emoji) displayed on Emojipedia are the official emoji names sourced from the Unicode Standard. Emoji images belong to their respective creators, and we display and archive these for the purpose of commentary and explanation,” it says on its website.

For instance, on the emoji with a tongue sticking out with glee, Emojipedia explains that it is “widely used to convey that a food item is delicious”.

“It may also express that a person is attractive,” it adds.

Emoijipedia, founded in 2013, also tracks the usage of emoji worldwide, and it says that on Twitter, the most used emoji in 2020 was the one depicting a face with tears of joy. The second one was the loudly crying face followed by a pleading face then a red heart.

“Over one in five tweets now includes an emoji,” says Emojipedia, adding that five billion emoji are sent daily on Facebook Messenger.

One fond user of emoji is Hellen Birundu, a young entrepreneur.

“Some expressions can never be described accurately without emoji. I will struggle to capture the exact feeling,” she says.

Her most used emoji is the one depicting a person rolling on the floor, laughing to the point of tears.

But Shadrak Musyoka, another youthful entrepreneur, told the Saturday Nation that he is not a big fan of emoji.

“I rarely use them. I actually do not know what most of them mean,” he said.

As for Ms Ondimu, the linguistics lecturer, emoji will be around for a while.

“They are slowly emerging as a language of their own, with people sending an all-emoji messages to convey a string of propositions. But in their current state, they cannot form a language of their own also they lack of emoji’s to express abstract ideas,” she said.

“The future of communication is visual and emoji incorporated into the text messages are here to stay,” added Ms Ondimu.

FYI, today is the World Emoji Day. Enthusiasts settled on today’s date, July 17, for the most emoji reason ever. It is because if you want to use a calendar emoji on your Android or Apple phone, the available image highlights July 17.

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