They can almost be thought of as parenthetical asides which are intended by the writer to aid the reader in understanding tone and emotion in a compact way.
For example, which form unambiguously conveys sarcasm the best?
"Oh, it's Sam, isn't that great!"
"Oh, it's Sam, isn't that great! (jerk)"
Now replace (jerk) with an appropriate glyph and we're at emojis.
What written language sorely lacks is a standardized update to the punctuation system we use. We're limited to single digit tone marks and a couple ways of modifying the text to try to convey a tremendous range of tones and emotions. We also need a system that does so without using cartoon characters. It's very hard to convey serious emotional tones with variations of a yellow smiley face.
Western musical notation has an entire series of annotation marks to inform style on top of the basic "sentence" structure of the notes. It seems that writing also could use something similar.
Why do people insist on trying to shoehorn emojis into the realm of being a whole languange? Let emojis be emojis. They're not a language. They're not punctuation. They are how we use them.
I'm not a huge fan, but they can be fun and are quite good at conveying certain emotions and empathy. Plus other uses. Why must they be pushed towards use as something that they're not?
I don't find this to be true at all. They are missing key elements that convey emotion such as tone and the nuances of facial expression that isn't captured in an icon.
Unlike actual true human facial expressions that we are trained to use and interpret as soon as we are born, emoji usage varies dramatically between people which further dilutes the intended meaning (why did that guy use four smileys in one paragraph? why did she not respond to my emoji?). There's so many ways to misinterpret them because not everyone is using them the same that they lose their chance to be an effective tool to communicate emotion.
For a European language, not so much.
However, given that HN is startup central, note that if you are involved in startups and easily offended, you might want to give this video a miss.
Missing on your OS probably, since emojis are not Whatsapp-specific.
I wouldn't take this as a counterpoint to the headline, as they don't seem to communicate very effectively.
XD
I...don't know if there was a thought process involved.
Perhaps it won’t be long before we see emojis sprinkled throughout printed books (perhaps similar to TV shows popping up texting bubbles). If these icons have value as a way to express something in an interesting way, they probably belong in literature too.
Why would emojis evolve into a form of language? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
I came here to comment the fun tidbit that emoticons do follow Zipf's law. I know this from emoticons, because I mined some data from Twitter and plotted the frequencies.
My guess is that it's the same for emojis :)
Since emojis often bear graphic resemblances to our real faces, the understanding has often been that there would be no problems in interpreting them, and that the sender and the recipient would agree on such interpretation.
As someone fairly immersed in the emoji community, this is a strawman argument (i.e., no one really tries to argue this).
People love and use emoji not in spite of their ambiguity but rather because of it.
Even Unicode encourages emoji to have multiple meanings:
http://unicode.org/emoji/selection.html
Does the candidate emoji have notable metaphorical references or symbolism?
And from their FAQ:
http://www.unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html
Do emoji characters have single semantics?
A: No. Because emoji characters are treated as pictographs, they are encoded in Unicode based primarily on their general appearance, not on an intended semantic.
Many people want to think there are some folks out there like myself who are seriously arguing Emoji are a language, but this isn't really true. And I say that as the author of a book called "How to Speak Emoji". The thing is, it's a humor book designed to be sold in Urban Outfitters. It's not a real language guide.
If you're curious about more nuanced takes on how emoji are actually being used, here are some good resources:
Tyler Schnoebelen's talk at Emojicon: http://www.slideshare.net/TylerSchnoebelen/emoji-linguistics
Gretchen McCulloch on how Emoji aren't really threatening English: http://the-toast.net/2016/06/29/a-linguist-explains-emoji-an...
The tl;dr: journalists / bloggers would love to get someone to argue that emoji are a language so they can "Well, actually" them, but the truth is this isn't really happening much.
However, some of us are deeply curious about whether our usage of emoji are evolving language-like characteristics and grammars. See this recent research on whether emoji have their own syntax:
https://makingnoiseandhearingthings.com/2016/12/07/do-emojis...
Note that a distinct syntax is probably necessary but not sufficient for emoji to be considered a language.