Wordless wonders

“Are we back to communicating through primitive language?” lamented my friend Sita. “My son’s SMS from Boston initially used to consist of a few sentences describing his activities. Over time, the messages became just a couple of words, mainly as answers to my queries. Then it got replaced by abbreviations like Sry, Lol and now only emoji!” Her anguish apart, it’s a fact that the millennials’ messaging lingua franca has reverted to the primitive language of pictograms but born of digital world, known as emoji.

The word emoji has its origins in Japanese, (e-picture and moji-character), yet a gainful resemblance in English to the words emotion and emoticon, to describe the pictogram. The term ‘typographical art’ was used for pictograms in 19th century and were made up of dot, dash, hyphen and other punctuation marks of typewriter to produce a design. In 20th century, a casual email sent by Prof. Scot Fahlman (Carnegie Mellon university) to his colleagues outlining a method to identify jokes (I propose the following character sequence :-), read it sideways), caught the imagination of the digital world. The present form of emoji symbols, developed in Japan by the interface designer Shigetaka Kurita in 1999, took the messaging world by storm.

The use of emoji is not just restricted to being fun and ornamental. They bring out the emotional nuance of an otherwise flat text and add colour to the messages. True, they are not total substitute for words but they serve as the bridge between written and spoken words. They can soften a message in an emotional-heavy lift or communicate a sentiment effectively. The ‘oomph factor’ they bring in to the text in the form of intrigue or excitement is undeniable. This versatility is part of their appeal and makes them the vibrant and fastest growing digital language.

Smartphones played a huge role in the proliferation of emoji in that it often suffices to pick out an emoji than type out long sentences on tiny screens using thumbs. This new perspective in mainstream communication probably brought the emoji revolution on ascendant. Instagram witnessed the slow demise of internet slang with the rise of emoji. The business world picked up the cue and we witnessed Pepsimojis storming the world of Twitter and pizzas being ordered through emoji.

This new visual language seemed to have no linguistic barriers in expressing the emotional subtext of a message. The cold digital world, devoid of empathy and emotion, suddenly has come alive with these wordless wonders. A smiley face instantly lights up our brains and lightens our moods. Emoji are now optional written language in smartphones just like any global language. It is not surprising that Oxford Dictionaries, in the year 2015, made the announcement ‘This year’s word of the year isn’t even a word’, and named ‘the Face with Tears of Joy Emoji’ as the word of the year.