Given the impact emojis have had in written communication already, what if we were to take them as a more serious method of communication? What if we viewed them as essentially a new language, one which has been incorporated into English without our even knowing it? Then, what if we proceeded to evolve that language and iterate upon it? At what point would an emoji be able to convey what can currently only be conveyed with an entire sentence?

Our current emoji set is already extremely vast. It also boasts many emojis which do hold acute meanings within culture. However, I believe we‘ve only scratched the surface of emojis’ potential. Wouldn’t it be interesting to follow this line of questioning and create more emojis that could, in one simple character, represent such ideas as:

• “Terribly sorry, I’m running late but I’m on my way and I’ll be there soon.”
• “I don’t particularly care, you should choose.”
• “I know that may seem a bit embarrassing but I’m proud of it anyway.”

In this article I’ll attempt to explore what emojis are, how they fit into the historical evolution of linguistics and orthography, and their potential impact on the future of human communication.

(Let potential be the integral word here – the conclusions I will draw are not meant to be scientific but are rather intended to be food for thought.)

A Brief History of the Evolution of Writing

Before I can discuss how emojis fit into our current writing system, it’s important to first have at least a modest understanding of the history of writing. This will give the introduction of emojis a better context and help us keep in mind that language is a perpetually evolving tool, not one that is ever finished.

The Sumerians (in what is now modern day Iraq) are credited with developing the first known written script around 3100 BC. Egyptian hieroglyphs soon followed. It was in Mesopotamia though where the Sumerians first began to use cut reeds to make markings in lumps of wet clay. This early style of writing became known as cuneiform due to the wedge shaped markings the reeds would leave. (Cuneiform derives from the Latin cuneus, meaning wedge.)

Egyptians would soon innovate further with the introduction of papyrus. This would lead to a standardization of the hieroglyphic script by scribes, whereas cuneiform was typically the work of painters, sculptors and craftsmen. Hieroglyphs are believed to have survived well into the 4th century AD during the Roman Period before dying out.

Around 1600 BC, China became the last early civilization to develop its own form of writing. The most prominent difference between China’s early writing and those of the Egyptians and Mesoamericans is that China’s has survived all the way from then to now.

The next great innovation in the history of writing was the move to a phonetic system which records the spoken sound of a word. This came in stark contrast to the systems used by the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Chinese. This was when widespread literacy became a real possibility. The innovation first emerged in the trading communities of Phoenicia around the second millennium BC. The Greeks then made their contribution by incorporating vowels to the already existing Phoenician system. It was at this point when we had the first twenty four character alphabet, an early predecessor to the one we know now. (The word alphabet derived  from the first two letters in the Phoenician system, alpha and beta.)

The Romans would then develop the Greek alphabet further by forming letters suitable for the writing of Latin. From there, writing would soon spread through Europe and become a standard part of life and communication. There would remain several other evolutions and contributors such as the Olmecs and Mayans in Central America, Ulfila, Cyril, and Methodius, but it was at this point when we had a system that would be familiar to modern English speakers.

(As the heading says, this is a rather brief summarization of these events. For a fuller reading on the history of writing, I recommend this article by History World.)

A (Very) Brief History of Emojis

Fast forward some 2200 years. For those who might not know, emojis as we know them were invented in Japan around 1998-99 by a man named Shigetaka Kurita. Keep in mind that emojis are not the same as emoticons which were first introduced digitally in 1982. Emojis are cartoonized representations of objects and facial expressions whereas emoticons are created merely with punctuations marks, such as :-).

The influence and popularity of emojis remained mostly exclusive to the Japanese cell phone market for more than a decade after that. It wasn’t until Apple adopted an emoji keyboard in 2011 that they caught fire and spread globally. Then would soon be incorporated by Android operating systems as well. Today, emojis are a universally ingrained phenomenon with deep cultural impact. So much so it’s difficult to believe their history isn’t yet twenty years long.

How Do Emojis Function Linguistically?

Grammatically speaking, what are emojis? How do they function? Beside being a fun techno fad, what do they represent communicatively? In an attempt to answer these questions I’ll now briefly articulate some of the core components of linguistics and orthography. As I introduce each new concept I’ll discuss how they relate to emojis; I’ll do this in order to show how emojis fit into the English language on a technical, linguistic level.

1. Morphemes, Graphemes and Phonemes

Obviously, communication is both written and spoken. Less obvious though is the way in which these two divisions work in tandem and interrelate. Morphemes, graphemes and phonemes are the smallest units of writing and speech and thus are the basis for all communication.

A grapheme is the smallest possible unit of a writing system within a language, or essentially the smallest unit of a language’s typography. Graphemes include punctuation marks, letters, numerical digits, typographic ligatures and Chinese characters. Graphemes are the typographic equivalent of a phoneme. Phonemes are the smallest units of speech in a spoken language.

Morphemes are similar. A morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language and it may or may not stand alone, whereas a word is freestanding by definition. For example, the suffix /-ed/ (to indicate past tense) is a morpheme, but it is not a word.

Morphemes are the smallest grammatical unit in a language and they come in two types: free and bound. A morpheme may or may not stand alone and whether it can determines whether it is a free or a bound morpheme. While a morpheme may be a word, bound morphemes almost never are. Therefore, morphemes differ from words in that a word is freestanding by definition. For example, the suffix /-ed/ (to indicate past tense) is a bound morpheme, but it is not a word. You get the idea.

Therefore, to simplify, communication may be furthest broken down into graphemes and phonemes. Morphemes are then one step above those, and then you get words. And, in layman’s terms, you can look at morphemes as the bridge between graphemes and phonemes.

Emojis clearly are not phonemes because they don’t represent sounds. They could be considered graphemes because they are their own smallest typographic unit, and in the same way they can be considered morphemes because they are their own smallest grammatical units. However, as we’ll see, these would not be the most precise ways to define emojis.

2. Logographic Vs. Phonographic Language Systems

English is what we call a phonographic language. Phonograms are written characters which represent a phoneme, or a speech sound. This simply means that letters directly correlate to sounds within the language. They may also represent a combination of phonemes, as is the case with the Latin and English alphabets. (E.g. The ‘ough’ in although is a phonogram for the ‘O’ sound in English) Phonographic writing systems such as English hold a very important spot in the world of orthography. However, there are many other equally prominent scripts in use today that don’t rely on an alphabet. These systems, in opposition to phonographic ones, are called logographic. Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are perhaps the most prominent and well known of these.

A logogram is a written character which represents a word or phrase. Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs were early forms of logograms and modern examples include Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji. The usage of logograms in these languages is a bit complicated. In Chinese, logograms fall into six groups based on their etymology and function. I won’t dive into these but let it suffice to say that logographic systems are complex and incredibly diverse.

Most Americans would instinctively associate logograms with Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese. However, English uses a grand selection of logograms too. We almost subconsciously make use of the ampersand, pound symbol, percent symbol, dollar sign, and many more. Even our numbers represent logographic systemics. Could you imagine if we always had to write out the words for numbers rather than being able to write 1, 2, 3, etc?

In a somewhat abstract sense, emojis are a modern logographic script not terribly dissimilar to many Asian languages. Emojis have been unwittingly absorbed into our primarily phonographic language thanks in large part to the Apple keyboard. They are now a discrete and productive set of logograms which exist within English in the same way as the punctuation marks we’ve known for centuries.

3. Pictograms Vs. Ideograms

Under the umbrella of ‘logogram’ rests two main categories: pictograms and ideograms. Pictograms are logograms which pictorially represent the morpheme, such as the Chinese symbol for mountain. Ideograms, however, are logograms which attempt to visualize abstract concepts such as here, there, up, or down.

Our current, Apple sanctioned emoji set includes both of these. We have the more direct pictograms that represent objects (such as the car, baseball, or banana emojis) but we get into far more ideographic concepts with ones such as the face with little red hearts for eyes.

It’s interesting how pictographic emojis may act like ideographic ones when an emoji of an object becomes culturally associated with a certain word or idea. A trendy example these days might be the flame emoji. It has become associated with the term “lit” to describe what is basically a combination of good and cool. Herein lies the true power and potential of emojis; with them we’re able to create new ideas and meanings with a single character.

The Potential Future of Emojis

In text messaging, one of the early drawbacks was the way in which humor, sarcasm, and inflection would be lost, or at least difficult to convey. Emojis have done a tremendous job at remedying that. To convey that a text is meant to be funny or sarcastic can be as simple as adding a winking emoji. That rather substantial shift in the history of digital communication brought text and email closer to being as fluid as communicating face to face.

So now, what if we continued to develop the “emoji dictionary”? We could expand off of the current ones, whose meanings have become nearly common knowledge, to innovate new ones with even more precise meanings.

What This Might Look Like

This process would make emojis evermore like ideographic Chinese characters. An example would be the Chinese symbol for “rest” which is a combination of the characters for “person” and “tree”, as in one rests when leaning against a tree. Could we not adopt a similar system by taking emojis and adding subtle differences that are then commonly acknowledged to have very particular meanings? This becomes a very real possibility if we had, say, three emoji faces that were nearly the same but with slight variation.

For example, the “winky face” emoji can often be used to mean “I’m joking”. So, we could create variations of the winking face until we not only had an emoji to mean “I’m joking”, but also one for “I’m kind of joking, but also kind of serious”, or even one for “I’m making a joke about this even though I understand it’s a serious issue”.

If We Created New Emojis

Rather than creating variations of preexisting emojis, we could strategically create brand new ones. I’m certain that more emojis will eventually be created. The question is whether we will purposefully create new ones with intentional, discrete meanings associated with them from their inception.

This strikes me as something Apple would do someday. Imagine for a moment if at one of their WWDC unveiling conferences (where they announce new products and OS systems each year) they were to unveil a new line of emojis. In the big unveil they explain how their new emoji set (Applemojis perhaps?) will come with an app or link to their website that features a “definition list” for the new emojis.

It would be interesting for these definitions to be predetermined for us. It would almost be as if Apple (or any group really, I’m merely using Apple as an example) presented the public with a hundred new words in hope we might adopt them into standard English. However to me, it would seem absurd and inane to introduce new words. It strikes me as innovative and oddly ingenious to introduce characters with longer, more applicable definitions.

In one fell swoop Apple could introduce emojis with all of the meanings that I mentioned earlier in this article such as “I don’t particularly care”. They make a major leap in the still young history of emojis by creating, say, a hundred new ones all with useful, practical meanings. They could introduce a series with meanings such as:

• “I’ll let you know in a bit.”
• “I’ll get back to you once I know more.”
• “I don’t know yet, but I’ll tell you when I do.”
• “Why are you asking me? I wouldn’t know.”
• “Trust me, I’m as confused as you are.”

Or what about a few to help express apathy:

• “I don’t care because I think you deserve to decide.”
• “You choose. You like what I like so I trust you.”
• “I couldn’t care less (plain, pragmatic)”
• “I couldn’t care less (rude)”
• “I’ll be fine with whatever.”

Or simply some commonly used, simple expressions:

• “Kind of.”
• “Regretfully so.”
• “More or less.”
• “Undoubtedly.”
• “Touché”

Especially when used in combination with English, they could lead us to a more intuitive and expressive form of communication than we’ve ever known. This form is shorter, faster, and perhaps most important, is far better at conveying a feeling. Nearly everyone emotionally comprehends what is meant by a smiley face emoji, and this feeling is an important aspect of communication.

These examples may seem silly, but in the coming decades I anticipate emojis with these precise meanings (and many more) could become a reality. This is not to say that new emojis with expanded meanings are necessary. They aren’t. However, I believe that if we were to embrace their potential, the possibilities could be endless.

The significance of emojis is ambiguous. Their triviality and frivolousness can easily represent the plight of the Digital Age. However, emojis may hold more salience than we realize. The amorous adoption of this character-based symbol system may signify a potentially critical evolution of the English language and all written communication. I for one like the idea that our language could make steps toward an ever slightly more Eastern manner of thinking, that it may become more emotive, and that it might continue to evolve as we do.

(Dear Apple, when you eventually get around to enacting this exact idea in 2022 or so, I’ll be happy to settle for 10% ownership of the intellectual property rights.)