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emoji is not a language (#384)
* emoji is not a language Signed-off-by: Christine Dodrill <me@christine.website> * emoji is really not a language Signed-off-by: Christine Dodrill <me@christine.website>
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title: Emoji is not a Language
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date: 2021-07-14
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tags:
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- linguistics
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- philosophy
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---
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What is a language? This is something that is surprisingly controversial.
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There's some easy ways to tell when something is a language (one of them being
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that they have an army), but what about things like emoji? Is emoji a language?
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In this article I will attempt to argue that emoji is not a language unto
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itself.
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At a high level, language is a tool that we use to represent
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spatial/temporal/conceptual relations between objects/ideas/things, statements
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about reality and similar things among that nature. Many languages are broken
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into units of meaning that we call words. Here are some example words:
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- the
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- taco
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- is
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- beautiful
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We can break these words into two basic classes like this:
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| Content | Grammar |
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| :------- | :------- |
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| taco | the |
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| beautiful | is |
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It's worth noting that not all verbs fall into the "grammar" category. Things
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like "eat" would fall into a content word, however "is" is a special case
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because it is directly drawing a relation between two things. In the sentence
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"The taco is beautiful", there is a relation being made from one specific taco
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and the abstract concept of beauty.
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I want to argue that emoji has plenty of content words, but no grammar words. If
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we wanted to assemble an analog to "The taco is beautiful" in emoji, we could
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make 1:1 correlations between English words and emoji like this:
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| English | Emoji |
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|:------- |:----- |
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| the | |
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| taco | 🌮 |
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| is | |
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| beautiful | 🎀 |
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I dug through the entire emoji chart and was unable to find things that could be
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used for "the" and "is". Heck, even the word I used for "beautiful" was a
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stretch because the ribbon emoji is normally used that way. Is a language
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defined by words that have inherent meaning or is that meaning arbitrarily
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assigned by its users? Can I just firng out words like "xnoypt" as in "realizing
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how the word would be pronounced, Tom [xnoypted](https://youtu.be/aMgCBYgVwsI)
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out of existence"? Does that mean "xnoypt" is a word?
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The closest I was able to get to "the" and "is" would be metaphors that would
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fall apart when you want to discuss the actual things involved. Let's say that
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you assign arbitrary emoji at least to "is" so that you can end up with this
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sentence in emoji:
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🌮➡️🎀
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What if you want to talk about the concept of right though? Say you want to
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convey that the taco store is to the right of the office building. You'd need to
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say something like:
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🌮🏪➡️➡️🏢
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And this could be easily confused with the interpretation "taco store right
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right office building".
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But how do you know that it's a taco store? That's just a convention English
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follows where the thing being described is the right-most thing and other things
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on the left are just qualifiers or determiners to what's going on about it. It's
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a "taco store", not a "store taco". Other languages like French do have this
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reversed, so it could easily become a source of confusion.
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So what if you ripped out the grammar entirely? What if you just had something
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that was pure content? Could utterances like "🌮🏪➡️🏢" function in place of
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something that breaks apart the words into groups? How would people know the
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difference between that being a giant list of descriptors on top of a taco or an
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office building?
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How would you express verbs like "to eat"? Emojipedia says that 🍴 is used to
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signify eating, but what about cultures that don't use cutlery to eat with?
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Would this really be global enough to work in places like China? Cultural
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cross-contamination would likely be enough at this point that most people could
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get the message, but is this really representing the idea of eating or the idea
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of something that you can use to eat other things? Would using this mean that
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you could express what you ate with emoji? What would make it more of a concept
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of eating than "to eat", "mangxi" (Esperanto), "manger" (French), or "citka"
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(Lojban)?
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If language is a tool that we can use to describe relations, then we can sorta
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get them across with emoji by piggy-backing on top of the grammar of other
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languages. You can derive new words like "taco store" with phrases like "🌮🏪".
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You can use these to create meaning, I guess, but it wouldn't be very precise.
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You could get across the most common words and cultural ideas, but not much
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else.
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Certainly not technical things where detail is important. Where is that taco
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store in relation to the office building? Is it 5 meters to the right of it or
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500 meters? What color is the office building? What name does it have? What is
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the name of the road? What is the name of the taco store?
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What can you really convey with emoji that isn't also conveyed with words?
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You can create new words easily with some chat platforms and how they use emoji
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though. You can either describe "nonbinary people" as "🚫🔢0️1️🧍" or you can just
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upload an image of the [nonbinary pride
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flag](https://gender.wikia.org/wiki/Pride_Flags#Nonbinary_Flag) to use as a
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direct descriptor of the concept instead. In a way emoji gives you a level of
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freedom of expression that simple words can't. The word "xnoypt" makes sense to
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people that know the word, but the picture has a greater chance of being closer
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to understood on its own. Here is an emoji that my coworkers use as a loving
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description:
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<center>
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</center>
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This one is called `friday_deploy` and is used as the avatar of our deployment
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bot as well as a way to describe the abstract horror of deploying software on a
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Friday. By being an emoji it can represent something more than just the
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pictograph that it is.
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These all certainly encode meaning on their own, but meaning on its own doesn't
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make a language. Emoji certainly could become a language, but it would need a
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lot of work to become one. Even then it would likely fall into the other
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failings that International Auxiliary Languages that have fell into. It is
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easier to type emoji than it is to type things like Esperanto's "ĉ", but it's
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going to inherently encode assumptions in the creator's first language.
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Emoji is not a language, it's used to augment existing languages.
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> If you want to claim that emoji is a language, you should be able to make that
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> same claim using emoji. Not an ad hoc cypher of the english sentence; just use
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> emoji the way people commonly use them, which you're saying counts as a
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> language, to say "Emoji is a language".
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- allthingslinguistic
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I'd be willing to be proven wrong if you can write "Emoji is a language"
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unambiguously using emoji without it being a baroque cipher of English.
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