The smilies and symbols present on the keyboards of our tablets and smartphones with 6 billion daily conversations per day are the language of the Net
Question for the most attentive Internet users: what is the most used language on the Net? Are you thinking of English, Spanish or Chinese? You’re off the mark. With over 6 billion daily conversations, the most used language on apps, social media and websites is emoji. Yes, emoji are the smilies and symbols.
Emoji have been taking over our smartphones and computers for years now. And over time they have replaced many words and phrases: to convey your mood to your partner, you use a smiley face, not express it in words.
Think of the smiling face or the one that sends a kiss. And say that the emoji were born in Japan in the nineties but for some time they were not used in the West. The success came with the spread of the first instant messaging programs (MSN) and then with the arrival of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
The growth of emoji
A success so important that nowadays you can read the book Moby Dick by Herman Melville entirely written through emoji. The book is called Emoji Dick, and it was written by Fred Benenson. And the number of emoji in recent times has also grown by leaps and bounds. In the late 1990s there were at most a hundred faces and symbols, today we have exceeded two thousand. Emoji can represent any mood and different aspects of common life. From sports to entertainment. From food to animals. Almost always they are direct and have an easily recognizable meaning, but in some cases, like a real language, they leave room for a certain semantic ambiguity. And so they allow for some interpretation for both the reader and the writer.
Numbers of emoji
For emoji, numbers speak. Every Net or mobile user can use this “language”, and this means that about 3 billion people speak through emoticons. Just think that the people who speak English are about 1.5 billion worldwide. As mentioned, there are over 6 billion conversations characterized by emoji exchanged daily globally. And after an initial phase of development only on the Web, emoji are now beginning to influence reality as well. So much so, in fact, that emoticons have even found their way into the courts. In the United States, for example, a grand jury chose not to proceed against a Facebook user who had posted guns aimed at the head of a policeman. While in France a man was sentenced to three months in prison for sending a message with a revolver icon to his ex-girlfriend.