Forget AI, the Emoji Language Revolution is Coming
With emoji ruled legally binding, a linguistic revolution is on the horizon. Audley Managing Partner Imogen Beecroft asks: are we ready to embrace it?
“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue.”
Hamlet’s instruction to his players in the ‘play-within-a-play’ about the precise delivery of their lines reminds both them and the audience that there is far more to language than words alone.
Words are limited: for their meaning (that is, the meaning intended by their author) to be fully understood, they must be accompanied by context, nuance in speech, gesture, facial expression.
It is extremely rare that language is limited to speech alone; it is a ‘multimodal’ device. As UCLA psychologist Albert Mehrabian noted in his 1967 research, only 7% of human communication is in the words we choose. 38% is in the way we say those words, while 55% is our body language.
If we remove the aspects of communication arising from verbal delivery, our ability to infer meaning is limited.
Take ‘trippingly’, a Shakespearean neologism, the meaning of which has been much debated. Agreement that it is likely to mean ‘nimbly’ or ‘lightly’ has largely been reached because of its use in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where it’s related to the light hopping of birds from branch to branch.
Without this comparison, our reading of Hamlet’s ‘trippingly’ would depend entirely on the actor’s choice of interpretation. Bearing in mind there are no recordings of 17th Century Hamlet performances, we have only the written word to go on.
Over time, humans have found ways to enhance the meaning of written text. Punctuation is a helpful assistant and represents a significant step forward in the sophistication of our communications. For example, the exclamation mark is a result of the morphing of the Latin ‘io’, meaning ‘joy’ and commonly used at the end of a sentence to denote cheerfulness, into the symbol we know and overuse today.
Unsurprisingly, the use of punctuation became more systematic around the invention of the printing press, which necessitated an attempt to impose uniformity of meaning in written texts. The digital revolution further heightened this: the rise of email, text, social media, and instant messaging means more and more of us are speaking to each other in text form.
In 2019, a UK study reported that the number of digital conversations overtook face-to-face conversations for the first time. This trend has only increased since the Covid-19 pandemic, with the average Teams user sending 32% more chats per week in February 2022 compared to March 2020.
Again, we have found ways to bring this communication to life with punctuation and typographical symbols. Asterisks function as a footnote, signifying a correction or addition to the above, while ‘~’ either side of a word means the author is being sarcastic. In a forum where punctuation appears much less frequently, its use takes on a new significance. One only needs to have experienced a tense WhatsApp exchange to know that ‘yes’ and ‘yes.’ have very different implications.
This increasing prevalence of text-based communication has made the necessity for tools to infer meaning even more critical. Enter the emoji.
The first 176 emoji were created in 1999 by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita and appeared on an early mobile phone. Since then, 3664 icons have been indexed by Unicode, an IT standard for the consistent handling of text. Considering the average educated Chinese person knows about 8000 Chinese characters, it’s not inconceivable that one day we’ll know them all.
Emoji may have started life as a fun, additive linguistic feature, but they are far from inconsequential. Last month, a court in Canada became the first to accept an emoji as a legally binding agreement, ascribed equal weight as a signature. The case involved an agreement over WhatsApp about the purchase of some grain. The seller later claimed his thumbs-up emoji was merely an acknowledgement of contract receipt, not acceptance of its terms. He was overruled and fined $61,442.
Like it or not, emoji are a commonly accepted means of communication, as well as a useful and efficient one.
And yet they are still limited in corporate communications. The occasional smiley, fine. But how often do you see the ‘hear no evil’ monkey? Emoji are still regarded as fun, informal devices. And yet their potential – and efficiency – far outpaces the written word in many instances.
What’s more, they are iconic rather than symbolic devices; i.e., they look like what they represent. This makes them less open to interpretation; a crying face, for example, evokes the sentiment it stands for. They are therefore more appropriate to a world of increasingly text-based communications.
Opinions on emoji use in the workplace are largely divided by age: around half of younger users (18-29) believe emoji to be work appropriate and a better way to express their feelings, while their older colleagues are much more conservative. This reflects a tide that is changing and will continue to do so.
And why shouldn’t it? If we accept that language is multimodal, and that emoji are a useful signifier, adding meaning, clarity, and insight to non-verbal communication, is there any reason to resist their use in corporate or formal communications?
It would surely limit the scope for interpretation, perhaps to the sorrow of literature scholars; at the same time, isn't there more fun to be had in discussing the meaning of ‘trippingly’ than whether a colleague’s ‘kind reminder’ is really kindly intended?
By Imogen Beecroft, Managing Partner at Audley.
Image credit/Ray in Manila/License