Emoji: Our First Global Language?
Emojis are on almost every digital device today. Could they become a global language? What role will they play in a connected world?
Little could Japanese graphic designer Shigetaka Kurita have known that the symbols he was tasked to design for mobile devices would become a global phenomenon. And possibly have brought into being a new global language. What he created we today call emojis. They’ve gone far beyond phones into apps, stuffed toys and other trinkets, artefacts of culture.
Today, while emojis are everywhere and on the surface may seem fun, annoying to some and just an aspect of everyday life, they are also geopolitically loaded and bring in power dynamics, cultural representations and societal impacts. Let’s explore the emoji and the possibility of them becoming our first (aside from math), global language.
Perhaps too it is fitting that emojis arose from Japan to begin with. The evolution of the written Japanese language itself is largely based on symbols. It is a combination of three writing systems; Kanji (symbols borrowed from Chinese), Hiragana, a phonetic alphabet and Katakana, another phonetic alphabet mainly used for foreign words and sometimes for emphasis, like italics in English.
