Emojis Are Weird (Linguistically Speaking) 

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I think the 💀 emoji is a good example of how an emoji can have a meaning which is readily understood by people familiar with its use on social media, but is quite difficult to succinctly define in words

Another thing going against emoji being their own language is that they can mean something completely different depending on the language they're used in. The best example being 💦. In Japanese that means panic, hurry, anxiety etc. In English it usually means something a lot more nsfw

I love how we just made these emojis 💀😭 to mean laughing

Guys, we all know that emoticons are still the superior way of expressing emotions over the internet, forget emojis

Chinese speaker here, characters at 3:35 say “I love linguistics”. Nice easter egg.

As an autistic person, I find emojis extremely helpful for disambiguation. I tend to take things literally or at least be very unsure if the other person is joking or not (or regarding subtler things like their mood), even in contexts where it might be clear for neurotypicals. And often, I have too much anxiety to ask for clarification. When people use emojis, it makes their intentions significantly clearer for me and reduces a lot of insecurity in interactions. Also, when I write myself, I consciously use emojis to neutralise my sometimes rather frank wording. Thank you for addressing autistic people’s relationship with emojis (also quite respectfully) in your otherwise also very interesting video! Just wanted to add this aspect to what you said. (:

This paralinguistic aspect of written language is just like facial expression or gesture while speaking face-to-face. They have different values to different cultures and languages. Oh well, what am I saying 💀🗿🤡🥵🙄😔😴🤮🥰😘👉👈💖👁️👄👁️👍✨🥲🙃👀😭🤭🙈🙏

I find it so interesting how some emojis have lost their "actual" meanings in some situations. 😭 can be crying, but also laughing, being in disbelief, etc.

I’m an aspiring deaf educator and I’ve noticed Deaf people tend to use emojis more frequently than hearing people. These are also usually people who type like they sign which leads me to believe it has something to do with the nature of sign language. In ASL, facial expressions is far less paralinguistic than in spoken language. It can be thought of like tone or stress. The sign for “late” or “not yet” for example is signed with the tongue between the teeth, as though producing an L. Mostly though it’s used to convey how something is said. Again I think this is because in ASL this is done purely through facial expression and is therefore visualized as such. There are also very deaf specific emojis like 🤟🏻 which literally means “I love you” and is often used as a casual greeting or causal way to apologize. Such as “See you tomorrow! 🤟🏻” or “Oops, didn’t mean it! 😬🤟🏻” Or even more specific to ASL is 💋👊🏻 (kiss fist) which loosely means “I love it” and is taken directly from the signed idiom.

thank you for talking about autistic peoples difficulties w/ emojis. i’m autistic and although i’m maybe more socially adept than a neurotypical persons idea of an autistic person, i still find myself asking friends what emojis mean in certain situations. great video

Anecdotally, another thing to add would be the trend (probably particularly among gen z) over the last few years of using 😭 as a laughing emoji (and, more recently, 💀). Among young tech-literate regular internet users of my friends (I'm in HS), 😂 is considered antiquated or even outright disrespectful at times. In response to someone saying they accidentally tripped over themselves, for example, responding 😂 conveys laughing *at* them, while 😭 reacts much more lightly to the humorous situation without being disrespectful. At least with respect to younger generations who've grown up with emoji, they've definitely evolved into arbitrary ideograms rather than being pictographically tied to their concepts. (Tangentially related is usage of the words "lol" and "lmao" not to indicate laughter but to lighten the overall message, such as "I'm collapsing under the pressure of my studies lmao")

Object emojis are very rarely used as literal representations of the object, so they’re basically a whole library of free symbols for people to attach their own meaning to. Currently only a few such as 🗿,🍑, and 🍆 have received this treatment, but I expect this number to increase with time.

as an autistic person i actually find emojis quite beneficial in online conversations, mainly on discord. there's something very useful about being able to respond with an emoji when you can't think of anything else to add to the conversation. it's also interesting when you're in a server and people respond to a message with emojis and build it up into like a game of getting whatever associated emojis you can get onto the message, even using the letter emojis to spell out words cos for some reason responding with a single word via emojis is more socially acceptable than... just properly responding with the word itself? it's all so fascinating. been really enjoying the channel & content btw, please keep up the good work! ❤

Related fun fact: Lojban has verbal emojis. You can just tell people what emotion you're feeling or what the intention of your words is using a short word.

3:37 - I’m sorry, 🤨 means “confused”?! I always interpreted it as either the “are you sure about that?” or the “I think you’re lying to me” kind of expression. Confusion would be this: 🤷🏻‍♂️

As a person with autism, I have an anecdote you may find interesting. I went to an elementary school for special needs kids, and I actually had a class there where I was tasked with memorizing which emotion corrisponded to a given facial expression, and the negative ones where always harder for me than the positive ones. To this day, unless it is super obvious (ex 😈 = mischievous) I still interperate most negative emojies as just sad.

Definitely worth looking into the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. He says some really interesting stuff about the intersection of pictures, icons and language, and the way we emotionally project onto them. One really interesting thing he covers is how the visual symbols for various emotions are completely different in the Japanese manga tradition than in the American comics tradition, and are generally not mutually intelligible unless you get to know them through exposure and context, therefore implying, as you said, that those visual symbols of emotion are ideographic rather than pictographic

3:36 Interesting. I interpret 🤨 as being either confusion, intrigue, suspicion, or some combination of the three depending on context, since each could be considered "eyebrow-raising" emotions

Well that was a good transition into an ad, I don't even know how would I be supposed to skip it You really could have explained tone indicators. Or at least give them more attention than one sentence and promptly skipped graphic I also find it very interesting what the culture related to emoji is and how it changes. Using too many emoji is considered outdated and most of the time signifies that you're a woman aged at least 30. Using no emoji at all may be seen as stiff and no one ever understands that I'm not super serious if I don't use an appropriate emoji or aforementioned tone indicators. Using just crying laughter emoji is often considered cringey and using them as a literal illustration (like a book when talking about a library) is starting to mean that you're not very up to date on internet culture

That segue was too smooth

sometimes in groups an emoji gets a certain meaning. like with my friends 🗿 means something that i can’t even put into words and obviously we don’t have a sound for it but it changes meanings of sentences when used

That sponsor transition..... I have no words....

An interesting phenomenon that is not unique to emojis, but that they do so much more than any other predecessor in their mould is that they don't just have a transformative value in written text, it's also the fact their absence is just as rich in transformative properties. The lack of emojis may communicate, disinterest, the concealment of negative emotions (just as distaste or irritation) etc. For example, "I saw Mark today" and "I saw Mark today :)" doesn't just add further nuance to the second sentence. Within a certain context, the first sentence may be just as nuanced/transformed because it implies e.g. that you are about to tell something pertaining to meeting Mark. The second sentence doesn't invoke that expectation, because the emoji removes the need of inquiry; you are just happy you saw Mark. Also, another interesting thing, it's that written text with emojis and written text without emojis is distinctly non-commutative and they don't mix. A formal text is strictly without emojis, for example. So, for someone adept in both informal written speech with emojis and formal written speech without them, they are essentially exhibiting a somewhat perverted form of "written diglossia". It's similar to the conventional diglossia seen in populations where a regional dialectal variation is used (potentially both written and spoken) informally, but formally a centralized, uniform form of the language is used.

I use emojis as a sort of unpronounced sentence-ending particle in almost all cases 😎. i view them as similar to some japanese particles that fulfill the same role of indicating mood, how the speaker feels about what they're saying: 😎indicates irony, lightheartedness, and/or emphasis, 🤔conveys uncertainty or questioning,🤨can be confusion or when something is kinda sus or off in general, often with a more comedic vibe. there's also :), which i never use as its emoji form, to indicate a more chaotic vibe like "no please don't burn down that orphanage" ":)", and :( for a lighthearted sadness, like if someone were to jokingly insult me. also interesting is that reduplication of emojis is productive; writing 😎😎😎indicates a far more ironic mood and :))))) feels far more chaotic. in almost all cases, i think, reduplication also makes the sentence far less serious.

The part about how emojis can be interpreted differently to different people really spoke to me. My friends use emojis a lot more than I do, and I always hate when they send ones like these 😊😁☺️ because to me they come off as extremely condescending

In Russian emoticons are very widely used to mark that you are joking (or just to mark that you are talking informally or something like this). In fact they simplified to just ) and ( for :) and :( respectively.

2:07 You got me so good, I had no Idea where you were going with that until it was too late.

I always assumed face emojis represent interlocutor's facial expression, that would make them true pictograms. Sure you then jump to "this person is happy" or "this person is about to vomit" but that's exactly what we do when seeing facial expressions irl

I would think that some emojis are "pictographic metonyms": displaying only part of the thing/idea/concept to stand for the whole. This isn't unusual. For example, in Linear B the signs for some animals are simply drawings of their heads (though they're regarded as ideograms some are clearly still pictorial). Nobody would have interpreted a Linear B document regarding a herd of horses in a paddock to be referring to a stack of severed heads in a barn... We can see similar emotional metonymy in literature. Here's Bronte (var. Charlotte): "Mrs. Fairfax had dropped her knitting, and with raised eyebrows, seemed wondering what sort of talk this was." We're expected to understand that "raised eyebrows" connects to "wonder", rather than simply being a description of her face. Later writers use the phrase with no further explanation, the description standing for the whole emotion: "His decision to put Sussex in first...was met with more than one raised eyebrow..." However, there are cross-cultural issues: we don't need language to understand this emotional metonymy, but we do need the same emotional-facial associations. Smiling might obviously mean "happiness" to many in the West, but not elsewhere. Raised eyebrows might be even more specific. And, as you point out, even internet culture breaks these associations, as could being autistic. So, I would argue that these emojis are still pictograms, but using conventional processes to extend their meaning/depiction. Maybe this is how logographic writing systems developed, using metaphor and metonymy to extend meaning until they went so far that the conventions were specific to writing alone, and were no longer paralleled in non-linguistic practices/culture? (I could, of course, be wrong. :P)

As a computer science guy, emojis are part of the Unicode character set. Your favorite programming language quite possibly has a way of printing them using their numeric codes. To me, ☝️ isn't much different than the letter A other than taking up a few more bytes of space. They're both pictures after all.

I also think it's funny how the meaning of emojis change sometimes when you add them together, for example 👁👄👁💅🏼 or 👉🏼👌🏼, it does feel like a language somehow

Could it be that emojis are just a paralanguage but for written speech? Just like with intonation and gestures, their meaning is completely dependent on the context of the conversation and shouldn’t be interpreted apart from it.

I did not see that emoji with the one raised eyebrow as "confused"... unless Spock was continually confused.

one of the things i'm very interested in is how the meaning of emoji's has changed over time, and how everyone kinda just, agrees on it too i could say "i'm doing ✨great✨" which of course means "i want to cry for eternety" but then thats different to "i'm doing great💀" while they're both sarcastic they're different and it makes no sense but somehow a bunch of people understand it?!?! i need to see a video essay on this please also feel free to reply to this with examples of emoji's that mean something just nothing to do with them ut somehow it's become standard practice i want as many as possible0

disappointed you didn't bring up the skull emoji turning into a laugh or sometimes disbelief, but great video as always!

I love this guy holding in a laugh the entirety of the vpn advertisement section

You can hear the smile in his voice as he transitioned to the sponsorship section. Excellent segue right there.

I would consider emojis a separate language in itself. It's not uncommon for people to mix languages. I would say some abbreviations also work similar to emojis. smh is more an emotion than an action, you won't type "I smh to dry my hair".

the highest form of communication is when i saw someone say 🤓 and someone else responded with "🤓" 🤓

smoothest and most natural way to introduce a sponsor known to man

As someone on the spectrum I've found that tone indicators are typically far more useful than emojis, but that emojis can often be used to further specify a tone. /s (sarcasm), for example, can mean any number of things based on context, which an emoji can disambiguate. I will say, though, that it is typically redundant.

There's also another way of conveying tone and expressing emotion with text that people never seem to talk about. Text itself can be a tone indicator. "I AM YELLING" is an example of this where using all caps shows yelling. "I aM DuMb" may convey mocking or irony.

Emoji are like body language and intonation. They are paralinguistic mechanisms to clarify and complement what is being said.

1:50 - sickest sponsored ad transition I've ever seen

This is so amazing, your channel are basically if a group linguistics undergrads hired a more capable person to make their banter into videos

I think there is also a distinction to be made between intent and perception here. Personally, I have a stock of about 10 emojis/emoticons that I use regularly, and when I use them, I think of them as a piece of punctuation or a non-pictographic ideogram. I would argue that this is basically the same as someone who speaks Chinese (not me lol) reading 男 as "man" rather than reading "field-strength" and then thinking "OHH IT MUST BE A MAN (duh)". However, the person I'm sending the message to may well have barely seen that particular emoji before, certainly not in this specific context. They have to go through the thought process of frowning face --> sadness, thus interpreting it as a pictographic ideogram. Anyway not really sure if or why this is relevant but there we go 🤷🏻‍♀️

I’m learning Spanish so emojis r really helpful when I’m outta vocabularies while texting a native speaker in his language

Normally I skip sponsored segments, but I respect how smooth that was.

2:07 I despise VPNs (or rather I despise the marketing buzzwords used to promote them), but I have to admit: this is probably the most clever segue used to introduce the sponsor of a video I ever heard

This is singlehandedly the best sponsor transition I've ever seen, and it actually connects incredibly well to the video

My favourite emoji is 💀, the evolution from ‘lol’ to ‘I’m dead’ to just skull in a matter of years interests me greatly

I personally never use emojis when I text and multiple times people have told me they misinterpret my texts as more agressive than they actually are. I personally had never thought of them as similar to the question mark before watching this video, and now it all makes a lot of sense.

Seeing differences in emojis across platforms and websites, where the same emoji looks different in different places, is the main reason I prefer emoticons. They don't really change how they look or their meaning unless if they're in a different font. Which I guess emojis that are the same and look different are also just differently fonted characters. So would that overall mean that font is important for meaning in text? In the same manner that bold and italics and strikethrough and underlining and super/sub-script are used to change what something means, fonts can be used to change that too. Using Times New Roman could mean what's being said is very formal and should be taken literally, whereas Comic Sans is more casual, and Spicy Rice is a way of showing something to be fancy. I have no problem with seeing differences in emojis as different fonts, but when the look of the emoji changes depending on what device you're using isn't right and should be changed. Emojis are really useful for expressing feelings and tones and concepts in speech that would be difficult or too lengthy to explain with text, and having the meaning change based solely on what device you're using is bad. I think anything created to add extra meaning or to simplify concepts in speech or writing is fine if people can (for the most part) understand its meaning and intention😊:D

Emojis can also have a phonetic element. I dunno if people still do it, but a few years ago emoji say-what-you-see messages were a thing. It's also worth talking about how much more complicated emoji meanings can be. I mean, sending someone a vegetable emoji can be sexual harassment through the power of context. I read an article a couple years ago about how emojis can cause serious legal headaches because of the difficulty of interpreting them and then explaining that interpretation to a judge or a jury without sounding like a nutjob.

As an autistic lady, I'm SO GLAD that there is research showing that it's not just me having no idea what emojis are supposed to represent. I have/do learn(t) them mostly by how they're used, but I also don't use them much because I don't want to use them wrongly. However I do love to send completely nonsensical bitmojis to my mother because I think that's chef's kiss emoji. Edit: I have also been on the internet for A Long Time and I have gone through emoticons so I have spent time adapting to this way of expressing yourself, even if I don't really partake in it much anymore (though I used to...rawr xD...)

That sponsor ad was brilliant

Gretchen McCulloch's book "Because Internet" has a really interesting chapter on the linguistics of emojis. She compares them more to gestures than words. Gestures can have multiple complex meanings that vary between cultures and support spoken language in a way that we also see with emojis and written language. It's a compelling argument and a great book for sure!

the Somali script you showed, which is called the Osmanya script, isn’t used by the government, education, or by the people and is more of a proposal than anything. 95% of Somali speakers don’t even know of it, let alone read it, and Somali just uses the English Latin script. in fact, more Somali speakers know how to read the Arabic script than Osmanya.

Emojis seem like co-speech gesture to me - they aid in communication, and their usage varies cross-culturally (with variation in what each emoji means in both granular and broad terms), which sounds a lot like written co-speech gesture. Co-text gesture? Idk lmao

That transition into atlas VPN was PICTURE PERFECT

The weirdest emoji misunderstanding I've ever faced is with this one: 😪 I've always understood it and used it as a way to add a sarcastic/annoyed/resigned tone to a message, as in: "are you serious now? 😪", but not in an aggressive way. But I was surprised to learn that everyone interprets it as "being sleepy", when this: 🥱 and this: 😴 already exist

this reminds me of because internet by gretchen mccolloch she argues that emojis are "emblems," in the same vein as shrugging to show uncertainty or moving your hands to show you're still talking-they add important information but you need context to understand them...she explains it much better and goes into more detail but i didnt see anyone mention that yet so thought i would lol

something really interesting to me is how discord (maybe other apps too) allows users to create CUSTOM emoji by uploading images… theyre server-specific and in my own close knit group of discord friends, we have a ton of custom emojis that mean EXTREMELY specific things that cant be put into words… they become more and more ideographic with use… also worth noting is how some emojis feel totally different across platforms (compare 😐between apple/samsung emoji sets, or 🤢between apple/twitter sets)… i personally have autism along with most of said friends and i feel like emojis (especially custom ones) actually help me to express myself way more easily jajaja

That sponsor transition was so flawless I didn’t even see it coming

So 🤨 means "I'm confused"? I've always thought it means "I'm skeptical"

3:46 I use this emoji as sus

This video has the best intro for an advertisement I've ever seen on RU-vid.

I like to think of emoji as analogous to gestures: its sometimes culturally specific, but can also be universally recognised, a lot of them are specifically linked to bodyparts, and they are difficult for people with autism

I'm Autistic but also hyper-empathic - and I'm also fluent in British Sign Language. The raised eyebrow emoji I've seen used and also used myself to denote ''really?!' in response to something that could be read as nearly inappropriate or risqué - sometimes deliberately said so to be comical, but not exclusively. For 'confused' I'd often just use a string of '????'. Thoughts?

As an autistic person, I've understood emojis but I've always found them cringe. I've always preferred to use emoticons instead. Though, now I use emojis slightly more leniently to spice up communication and show humour better, especially since I have slowly developed a sense of humour and understanding of satire over time.

the way you just said 'psychopathy' without skipping a beat i am deceased from laughter 💀🤣🤣🤣💀

Absolutely clean transition to the sponsor didn’t even realise till I saw the piggy bank

The most confusing thing about Emojis is that different people can be seeing them differently and can put different meanings into them. Like for me, the Emoji from 1:01 always was a blushing face, like when someone gives you compliment, but for other people it seems to be a symbol just to show that they're friendly

4:08 the perfekt Swedish gave me a jump scare,

Asking what emojis are is like asking what numbers are. They're their own thing.

I like how you saved the bit about semantic drift until the end. That's one thing about emoji that fascinate me.

5:40 Sidenote, Once I was wondering how emojis interact with punctuation, Like if I have an emoji at the end of a sentence, Does it go before or after the period? I decided to ask this question to some people, And one person suggested simply using the emojis themselves as the punctuation, Due to the presence of the emoji you don't need the period (Because who puts an emoji mid-sentence anyway?), Which is an interesting Idea.

The Unicode Consortium, the people behind emojis (and everything else text relating to computers) actually add more emojis when companies have different implementations of emojis to reduce ambiguity. I would recommend reading their interpretation of them!

You have earned my moment of signal boosting entirely on that AMAZING segue into your AtlasVPN advert!

i like custom discord emojis because then you can have entire sets of discourse in an extremely niche emoji/gif based writing system that only the people in that server would actually understand

Fascinating video, would love to see this topic discussed by more people

I usually read and use emojis as “this is what my face looks like right now (exaggerated)”. So they’re regular pictograms for me. Interpreting emotion from them is just the same as interpreting emotion from a person’s face in person. I get really confused when people send me more than one emoji. 🤨😛😖 nobody’s face can do all three of those at the same time

One of the differences between actual body language and emoticons (we called them emoters way back when, and emojis follow the same rules) is that they're intentionally added in where body language is often unconscious and compulsory. I typed that, and only _after_ I recognized I was doing it. Since I choose what to express, it still makes the online written word way different than in-person conversation.Too different to say one is analogous to the other, even if one was designed to be an analog for the other.

The introduction to the ad caught me soooo of guard. Super impressed by the clever segue. I didn't even skip it.

Raising an eyebrow is a sign of confusion. So I'd argue it's still a pictogram. Even if you don't think about the face position when used.

Almost everywhere in western europe instead of the smiley face ":)" people just write brackets, and you get something like "hello)))" or "sadge(((((". Stuff like that is acceptable even in semi-formal speech, and not writing like that in casual texting can come off a bit rude. And like, it implies an emoji, but easier to write, i guess? It's not a word, but not an ideogram either? I guess japanese "wwwww" falls into a similar category, but its not an emoji, and doesn't imply one. And then you have "UwU" which looks like a face, but its pronounceable, and therefore, pronounced. But i don't think you can call "UwU" a word??? I honestly have no idea what it means linguistically, but there's like a spectrum of meaning in garbage symbols, apparently

That ad transition was one of the best performances of recorded art in the history of cinematography. 😭

that transition to the sponsor segment was so smooth lmao

When people write text with emoji, especially English speakers, they tend to use English homophones to write. Like using 👁️👍2️⃣💃 to mean "I like to dance" because it sounds the same as "eye like two dance". But reading it in a different language will be confusing ... maybe it can also mean "correct, I can see two dancers" or "a dancer with 2 good eyes".

got me at the "psychopathy" (about 1:20)

It’s interesting to see how people say emojis out loud when reading a tweet or something. Some people just leave them out out, or only say the ones that are more literally like saying “book” for 📕. Others just use the commonly agreed upon short form of the emoji, like how 😂 is technically called “Face with Tears of Joy” but I’ve only heard it called the “Crying Laughing” Emoji. The third way I’ve seen people handled saying emoji out loud is by in some way vocalizing the sound of the emotion or making a similar face. For example letting out an annoyed grunt for 😒 or rolling their eyes for 🙄

That was such a ridiculously smooth segway I didn't see it coming until you brought me into the picture (literaly and figuratively). Well done sir

I've been thinking about this topic a bit lately, because I've been writing about English "neopronouns" - and since late 2017, it's been popular on certain parts of the internet to use emoji as a form of third-person singular pronoun. This practice is controversial due to concerns over accessibility and how to pronounce these pronouns when spoken... But I'm frankly not too worried about that, because these concerns apply to emoji use *in general* rather than specifically when emoji are used as ideograms for 3S.PRO. What makes "emojiself", as it's known, a particularly interesting phenomenon, is how it's a use of emoji more similar to Kanji than traditional emoji. If you ask someone who lists an emojiself as a preferred pronoun about that pronoun's pronunciation, then they'll generally say that emojiself pronouns are only meant for use in digital written communication; but if you say, "I would like to read a text with your emoji pronouns out loud, do you have a preference for which pronouns to replace them with in the spoken version?", the person will usually have an opinion... Which is to say, emojiselves *are* ideograms with preferred readings, but their users think of the ideograms and their readings as separate words, almost like they view written and spoken language as two entirely different things. It's that whole thing you mentioned about literary language, right? The other thing that makes emojiself a more Kanji-like use of emoji is how the text itself can help disambiguate the semantics of the emoji: case inflections, clitics, verb agreement, transitivity, et cetera, can all help indicate when an emoji is intended as a paralinguistic tone indicator versus as a linguistic noun or pronoun or what-have-ye. And this reminds me of how okurigana and Japanese particles and so forth can help disambiguate the exact semantics and readings of a Kanji... The difference, of course, is that Kanji are rarely used paralinguistically (not to say that paralinguistic Kanji aren't a thing, though). So yeah. It's neat stuff.

I always used 😁 for psychopathy.

That ad transition was so smooth I didn't even skip it 😂

That was the best segue into an Ad segment I've ever seen in my life

I'm autistic and I actually tend to use emojis a lot and like it when other people use them, because it helps assign tone and meaning to certain statements Like how me and my friends will add 🙃 to the end of a statement to indicate sarcasm I'm really bad at reading real faces, but emojis are really easy to interpret 😄

6:50 perhaps it could be called Emojian or Emotionese

I feel like the reason one of the main reason is due to how you would define emojis especially the ones that show facial expressions. I would argue that they do, in fact, directly lead to the concepts that they are supposed to represent and not indirectly they do it as at least I see it, they are a shortened little thumbnail image shorthand for showing a picture of the person whom you were talking to face with the emotion that they are feeling in the text at least as I see it is simplified facial expressions. Permit are intended to directly convey emotion aside from the ones use non-literally such as the skull emoji, Dave seem to be very direct