Emojis Are Weird (Linguistically Speaking)
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- čas přidán 27. 06. 2024
- You know what emojis are. But what ARE emojis, like, linguistically? Well, here's a brief overview. 🤷
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Sources:
Fahlman, S. (1982). "Original Bboard Thread in which :-) was proposed". School of Computer Science. Carnegie Mellon University.
Hand, C.J., Kennedy, A., Filik, R. et al. (2022). "Emoji Identification and Emoji Effects on Sentence Emotionality in ASD-Diagnosed Adults and Neurotypical Controls". Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Kaye, L., Malone, S., & Wall, H. (2017). "Emojis: Insights, affordances, and possibilities for psychological science". Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(2), 66-68.
Miller, H. (2016). "Investigating the Potential for Miscommunication Using Emoji". GroupLens Blogs. Available at: grouplens.org/blog/investigat.... [accessed 27/05/2022].
Miller, H., Thebault-Spieker, J., Chang, S., Johnson, I., Terveen, L., & Hecht, B. (2016). "Blissfully happy or ready to fight: Varying Interpretations of Emoji". GroupLens Research. University of Minnesota.
Sproull, L. & Kiesler, S. (1986). "Reducing Social Context Cues: Electronic Mail in Organizational Communication". Management Science, 32, 1492-1512.
Chapters:
0:00 - Pictograms
3:01 - Ideograms
4:39 - Why Emojis?
6:14 - What are Emojis?
8:02 - Credits
Written and Created by Me
Art by kvd102
Music by Me
Thanks to my patrons!!
Patreon: www.patreon.com/user?u=73482298
Translations:
@miaudelief - Dutch
James Morris-Wyatt - Spanish
@dip - Catalan
Le Napolitain - French
#emojis #AtlasVPN #bestvpn
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in other news, what did you think of the video?
nice video 🙂
Just as informative as the the video you did on arabic 👌
@@j2k14 That emoji’s creepy as hell 🫣
@@Isabelle-yq2zz ?
That ad segue was slick
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
If it were easy to define in words, people would just write the words instead of use it :)
personally I see it as a compressed version of "I'm dead (💀)", I might be wrong but it doesn't seem too far-fetched
I see 💀as something like "seriously are you kidding me".
I fell down the stairs the second time today💀
💀 is either "shocked/mortified" or "I'm dead from laughing so hard"
i forgor
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 mean, it’s a hurry, but another kind
Unless paired as 😰💦
Then it might appear panicked, or still nsfw, depends on context and how familiar the listener is with the dirtier meaning
that's just local variation, not necessarily language variation.
two english speaking places could have totally different meanings for it
and it can still change depending on context
In Japanese emoji use, 🙄also has no rude connotations because people read it as looking upward while thinking carefully. No way we could use it that way in English texting, lol
In Poland it means disrespect to another person, like spitting saliva.
I love how we just made these emojis 💀😭 to mean laughing
I mean, 💀 is like dying of laughter/"i'm dead" and 😭 is crying of laughter/sad but laughing so it isn't completly out of nowhere
@@lav-kitty also has the meaning of "bruh are you serious💀"
@@finesseandstyle I guess that'd be something like "💀you're dead" in a really specific way, like "nah, you're doing it wrong, they're gonna come for you" idk it's really specific
like, someone says something absurd and youre like "you're gonna be ""k¡lled"" (in a non-literal way) somehow if you keep being like that"
edit: after 3 weeks I finally found what term I was trying to use, it was "you're digging your own grave rn💀". May one day be replaced with "⚰️"
and because of people like you, I feel like I have autism
great, take this🎖
@@lav-kitty what but there’s an emoji for that 🤣
Chinese speaker here, characters at 3:35 say “I love linguistics”. Nice easter egg.
I've learned a bit of Chinese characters and I can proudly say that I could read them phonetically as well, wǒ ài yǔ yán xué
@@CommonCommiestudios 语‘s pinyin is yǔ / yu3
@@domlee5902 thanks for the head up, it's really hard to find the ǔ character
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Guys, we all know that emoticons are still the superior way of expressing emotions over the internet, forget emojis
:0
-_- chain
Emoticons are the real emOGs
What is emoticon?
@@ilhamfatan :) :/ :D
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. (:
Also another autistic person here, I agree with a lot of what you've said but there's also a personal addition I want to make. Which is that sometimes emojis and emoticons can add more ambiguity if the intention is unknown. For example I had a friend who never used :) and instead used ^^ or ^-^ to indicate positivity, because of this there was one time when they used :) instead and I assumed it was passive aggression based on the context of the conversation. A simple change from ^^ or ^-^ to :) completely changed the emotional impact of the message which I find fascinating (though it did suck in the moment).
@@Sky-pg8jm Interesting. I use ^^ and (: basically interchangably. But I can totally understand how you came to that conclusion.
Mood
Autistic here too, and Yes to all!
Another problem that I have come across is that, as an anime fan all my life, I have learnt the meaning of emojis from anime facial expression, so when people from my country choose to use a particular emoji for an entirely different emotion, it’s so confusing (and annoying, at times. I mean, why would you think this 😪 is a sad face!). This specially happens to me with the blue faces (blue means fear in anime), that a lot of people use for positive emotions, like 😱 for positive surprise or just neutral, instead of the horror that I associate it with.
@@fernandagonzalez2019 humans are just confusing tbh💀
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.
Emoji semantic drift? /j
@@epsi Oh wow yeah
💀lmfao.
Don’t worry, it’s just emoji puberty.
😅
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 💀🗿🤡🥵🙄😔😴🤮🥰😘👉👈💖👁️👄👁️👍✨🥲🙃👀😭🤭🙈🙏
You're being an absolute buffoon on the internet, embarrasing to everyone. You pass out and wake up hungover, but... looking for love?
Bone-headed Rapa Nui clown is hot for sarcasm but disappointed and tired because of gross wholesome kissing. This is really due to nervousness about love and acceptance of ones lucky stars. Anti-littering advertisements give another perspective and a second look at how sad and shocked we should be at the fate of monkeys. Pray!
How'd I do?
🤪🎉🤮💀💃😫😭❌👁️🦆
@@Salsmachev ✔️✅☑️📋🧠💡. 🤩🙌. 👍💭➡️💬❗ ✔️👷♂️🚹
@@Salsmachev 💯👏
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
His point about autistic people struggling to understand the meaning of emojis was almost immediately proven when he said that the emoji at 3:37 means “confused” lol. I’m autistic and no way in hell would I ever interpret that expression as confusion - it’s more like an “are you sure about that?” or “I think you’re lying to me” type of expression for me.
@@KasabianFan44 as an autistic individual
i also don't see the confusion in the face
@@KasabianFan44 I think your right that it generally mens skepticism/ incredulity, maybe confusion is its official meaning but that's not normally how its used
@@KasabianFan44 I'm neurotypical (or so I believe) and I don't know what the hell that emoji represents other than some vague skepticism
As a person with autism I actually found this quite strange, since I don't feel like I've ever struggled with emojis or emoticons, and as far as I know, most of my friends on the spectrum don't seem to have any trouble with it either, so it kinda surprised me to hear this.
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.
wow thats really interesting i never wouldve really thought about how difficult cultures of people with debilitations would develop their own unique meanings for stuff thats really awesome in a way! :D
That's really interesting, I'm aware that our native language dramatic affects our ways of thinking. One easy to identify example is ask someone to arrange pictures chronologically, a left to right reading english speaker will place the beginning on the left and the end at the right, a right to left reading Japanese speaker will reverse this order, and some of the natives of Australia don't have writing or even "left" and "right" in their languages and always use absolute compass directions and they arange the pictures east to west like how the sun travels through the sky. (They also have way better senses of direction than the average American)
I think its cool to think about how different sign languages (if we call one "American" sign language then clearly others exist) also act as a fundamental language for the brain to structure its thought patterns around and what that means for its native "speakers" (signers?). (Because the limits and features of your language define what you can even describe the same way you math skills limit your ability to properly describe the universe at higher levels of accuracy, without trig you can't describe AC electricity for instance.)
That’s really cool! Funny how there’s things like ❤️🥰😘 but because you’re more familiar with 🤟 it’s gotten a meaning that most hearing people wouldn’t understand 💋👊
That's realy interesting 💋👊🏻 I wonder if other sign languages do the same type of thing. I know BSL (British Sign Language) borrows bits from ASL sometimes in informat contexts, so I can imagine 🤟🏻 being used in the same way.
That’s fascinating
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")
@@epsi yep! It's a waterfall of tears on most platforms I've used. And I do agree that 🤭 would make sense in that context, but I've never seen it used that way. Just goes to show how far they've strayed in meaning lol :D
😭 doesn't stike me as laughing or humorous at all. At best it's complete devastation, and at worst it's being over dramatic.
I don't think I've ever seen 😂 used seriously. I'm more likely to use 🤣 to convey laughter.
🤭 is one of my favourite emoji, but I mainly use it when I'm being coy and deliberately hiding information to bait further questions. I'm not laughing at what happened or what someone's doing, but rather at the innocent lack of information in a given topic.
I like to use the skull emoji bc something about it just add like a level of irony and sarcasm to it, like you're laughing at something you shouldn't have, or to describe an awfully awkward situation, or also self deprecation humor. They just doesn't work with using the regular laughing emoji.
@@epsi i think 🤭 is popular among older generation. But the thing is, the 😭 emoji represent a specific type of response that are more than just laughing. It's more like a "nooo stooopp" (i seriously don't know how to describe this but you get it if you heard someone said it irl) 🤭 still feel like laughing but 😭 is more like whining (?) In a sense? Like "i can't believe I just did that 😭 im so embarrassed"
@@angeldude101 Oh yeah, that's another thing! At least in my particular "dialect" of online speech, the 🤣 emoji isn't ever used for that purpose. It has a stereotype of being associated with tech illiterate people (particularly very young, below age 12) and because of that I've only ever seen it used sarcastically.
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! ❤
relatable content
👍😎😀
I've seen slack servers where users had no right to comment, were allowed to respond via an emoji to the message.
So on a announcement "Global Meeting at 12:00 o´clock" (implying headquarters time) made someone replied with "U" "T" "C" "P" "L" "S" which i found very nice
@@marcelreiter181 Regional indicators are a blessing!
I very rarely use them in my own messages, but I do use reactions on Discord.
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
Interesting! Could you give an example?
@@CashKingD one example I can think of is the red hue on mario's sprite when he dies in super mario world. in japan, a red or darkish hue on a characters face generally denotes dread or shock or just a general negative feeling. however, you can find forums of english speaking players discussing how they found this strange or unsettling or didn't understand why it was rendered that way.
@Humble Commenter This is an interesting example, but I think there was also a lot less exposure to Japanese media back then, mixed with the low resolution of the sprite, that makes this seem reasonable imo. I feel like this is/would be less of an issue nowadays, between increased cross-cultural exposure and not being bitty little pixels.
@@CashKingD a bloody nose in anime means a sudden and strong feeling of arousal. A character running around with toast in their mouth is in a rush.
Fe, 💢 means anger/rage in manga & anime because it represents a bulging blood vessel found on one's forehead. However, it's rarely used in the west and as such there are loads more people unfamiliar with it and its meaning
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.
Probably because there is no pen!$ or @r$e emoji so people fill in the gap in communication, not to mention that using those words directly may result in your comment being censored. I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you.
Wait does the moai have another meaning?
@@lawrencecalablaster568 I wanna know as well.
@@ElJosher it's the bruh emoji
@@lawrencecalablaster568 it’s similar to 💀 but without laughing
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.
That part of Lojban always appealed to me as someone on the spectrum and it's why I love tone indicators!
That's such a lojban-y feature to have in the language
Is Lojban what Star Wars diplomatic/companion droids speak?
@@Sk0lzky No, it's a constructed language used in the real world, like Esperanto but different.
Saluton, loĵbanistoj! Hello, Lojban speakers!
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.
no bc there are so many more emojis that i feel are representing negative emotions than there are positives
I thought 😈 meant demon wtf my life has been a lie
yeah negative emotions for are also really hard but instead of think everything is “sad” but i always thought it was more aggressive and more “ill-intended” as if the 😈 was more visibly upset and knew that it could use its anger to physically, emotionally, or mentally hurt someone kinda like this emoji 👿
Yeah pretty much, I just kinda copy how other people use them then it starts to kind of make sense
@@comrade_cat303 I think it means deviousness/mischievous cuz it has devil horns. It's often used in a playful kind of way, but it kind of depends on the context. Kinky people use it when flirting a lot.
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
I just think “hm?”
@@wittykittywoes whenever I see or type it my mind does the tim allen home improvement grunt
@@platycorn5301 i think thats the perfect way to read it
I see it more like "wtf r u doing with ur life"
Me too, but sometimes it depends on how the emoji is rendered
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: 🤷🏻♂️
Exactly. I experience it as getting scrutinized
ive seen both uses
🤷🏻♂️ is more like whatever. Based on shrugging your shoulders. From japanese ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I interpreted it as the wtf emoji
@@kattkatt744 100%
That segue was too smooth
While it was, is it legal?
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
i didnt want to talk about them too much because I have a whole video about tone indicators lined up :)
@@kklein rofl
As a 32 year old woman, please explain the part where I’m outdated.
@@catlovingmaria4624 The part where you're outdated is the part where you can't take a joke
You sound like you have fun.
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.
NOOO im completely serious 😡😡😡
Or for extra chaos. (:
:(😎)
@@redpepper74 STOP BEING CIKPLEYSRLY SERIUOUS😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡
🙂
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.
for me... "I saw Mark today" is a normal statement, but "I saw Mark today :)" is like mildly threatening/sinister... what did you do to Mark...
"I saw Mark today 🥵"
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
"Sometimes used for various idiosyncratic purposes, such as conveying a stoic, deadpan, or silly expression." Maybe this is what you're looking for?
🐟🚼🧍🦙🦦🥀👾 these emojis speak to me on a spiritual level I swear
2:07 You got me so good, I had no Idea where you were going with that until it was too late.
That sponsor transition..... I have no words....
no words, only 🤔🤨🫡🙄🥱⏩️
i smelled it coming as soon as i saw the piggy bank symbol i skipped ahead before i even heard the name of the sponsor
I got a little bit confused about SponsorBlock suddenly skipping a bit, but then realized where it was going.
I watched it cause it was so cheeky
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.
@@user-pd9gg1qn7sI don’t know any Russian, but I have some suggestions in English based on the descriptions you gave!
/s at the end of a sentence = sarcasm mark. Not everyone knows what this means, but it’s getting more popular. Also, some people like to be jerks about it because they think it kills jokes, but it’s genuinely so useful when things are ambiguous
lol or :) = a less abrupt ending, even if you’re not actually laughing. the :) could get misread as passive aggressive, though, and “lol” is more commonly used this way by women (many other people use it that way, that’s just the broader trend). I don’t think there’s a perfect go-to softer ending, just many different ways to do it that all have different vibes
k = being a jerk by brushing off a long emotional message with a short, uncaring response
Also, your definition of :)))) is exactly how I would define it in English-a fake smile that’s hiding something negative. I also see people use 🙃 for this
@Albert )
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
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.
There's a pretty big difference between "☝" and "A". "☝" is yellow, and "A" has no colour. Unless you add some combining characters turning it into something like "☝🏾". So someone writing some stylesheets or templates or whatever can make "A" whatever colour they want, to fit with whatever style they want and choose a background colour to have the appropriate contrast, and change colour to indicate some change of status. But "☝" is always yellow, or some shade of brown. Which is a problem if your text is user-controlled. On my machine, CZcams has a black background, and "⚫" is barely visible. But if you had a white background, "⚪" would be barely visible. Even if every system had perfect emoji support, emoji rendering is not a solvable problem because they inherently have colour and other characters do not.
TL;DR: Colour emoji were a mistake.
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)
you might have just won the "best comment of the video" award, usually rewarded with a pin, but because of my sponsorship deal I have to keep my own comment pinned lol so here you get a longwinded message instead
Agreed, fantastic comment, have a response for the algorithm
love this
💯
THIS NEEDS MORE LIKES AND REPLIES!
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
But they don’t, 😂 conveys humor but doesn’t mean you are actually crying laughing; 😎 conveys “coolness” but doesn’t mean you are actually wearing sunglasses; 🤮 conveys disgust but doesn’t mean you are actually vomiting, etc. They’re sort of hyperbolic pictograms, they represent an archetypal and exaggerated form of the emotion you are trying to convey. And that’s without going into the ones that don’t even pretend to be a real facial expression, like 🤐, 😍, or 🤯.
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
🌚
🤨 📸 too
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.
disappointed you didn't bring up the skull emoji turning into a laugh or sometimes disbelief, but great video as always!
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
Hey, how are you doing?
I'm doing great🥲
(a lot of happening but I'm doing my best)
I'm doing great🙄
(tho I'm mildly annoyed by you asking)
I'm doing great😀
(And I mean it!)
I'm doing great🙂
(If you ask again, I'll skin you alive)
I'm doing great🤫
(There's something going on but I can't talk about it)
I'm doing great🫡
(I mean it and I hope you're doing, too!)
So many nuances...
I love the glitter emoji example
I somehow know exactly what it means even though i never use it myself
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".
When Willow Smith is like “I smh back and forth”
I love this guy holding in a laugh the entirety of the vpn advertisement section
1:50 - sickest sponsored ad transition I've ever seen
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.
I did not see that emoji with the one raised eyebrow as "confused"... unless Spock was continually confused.
You could show the representation of confusion on your face to communicate that the silly mf has 12 minutes to explain himself before you fast travel him into underworld
Yeah, confused is 😵, which confusingly is X_X on Apple devices, making more confusion. But since Apple decides what the emojis will look like¹, it's now officially X_X, and there will be a new emoji for @_@ instead.
¹ I know it's actually Unicode deciding what they should be like, but when Apple makes a decision like with X_X, 8-ball, water pistol, that becomes the standard even if everyone else already agree on other things.
@@Liggliluff is 😵 confused? Maybe it depends on context, but I usually read it as dumbfounded.
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.
smoothest and most natural way to introduce a sponsor known to man
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
You can hear the smile in his voice as he transitioned to the sponsorship section. Excellent segue right there.
That sponsor ad was brilliant
Emoji are like body language and intonation. They are paralinguistic mechanisms to clarify and complement what is being said.
Theyre*
This is so amazing, your channel are basically if a group linguistics undergrads hired a more capable person to make their banter into videos
this is so accurate lol
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
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
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.
"Say what you see" only works in a specific common language, though.
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!
This is singlehandedly the best sponsor transition I've ever seen, and it actually connects incredibly well to the video
That transition into atlas VPN was PICTURE PERFECT
Normally I skip sponsored segments, but I respect how smooth that was.
3:46 I use this emoji as sus
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...)
the highest form of communication is when i saw someone say
🤓
and someone else responded with
"🤓" 🤓
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.
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
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
huh i've never seen it used much but i'd interpret it as like exaggerated/pretend sadness, like wiping away a fake tear
Ah... i think knowing it came from japanese i cannot see it as anything other than a sleeping face. Watch loads of anime and only a sleeping character has that bubble from their nose growing and shrinking as they snore.....
So... my brain cannot interpret it any other way 😅 im gonna guess that 😴 may have been added for westerners?
Something similar happens with 🙆🏼♀️ some ppl in australia told me "it's a stretching emoji, hands stretched above head" and i burst out laughing coz this is literally just the way to say "correct" or maybe "okay" ( depending on context) in japan... so ... ppl don't realize what the emoji means and make up their own meanings.. problem now is, we have some ppls ideas and the actual meaning is forgotten/not even known O.o
i think 🥱 is tired or bored and 😴 is about sleeping while 😪 is dozing off?
If someone wrote “are you serious 😪”
I would interpret that as:
“im done with your bullshit”
@@dj_koen1265 Yes, exactly! That's exactly how I would think of it
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.
My favourite emoji is 💀, the evolution from ‘lol’ to ‘I’m dead’ to just skull in a matter of years interests me greatly
So 🤨 means "I'm confused"? I've always thought it means "I'm skeptical"
Even my autocorrect suggests another emoji for confused (which is 🤔)
@@SirioResteghini lol I use these the other way round (🤨 for confused and 🤔 for skeptical)
@@kklein Considering raising an eyebrow is usually a sign of scepticism or mild shock, I don't quite get the interpretation of "confused" either
4:08 the perfekt Swedish gave me a jump scare,
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.
emoticons > emojis
This comment perfectly describes me.
@@kklein kaomoji > emoticons > emoji ＼(。≧▽≦。)／
You have earned my moment of signal boosting entirely on that AMAZING segue into your AtlasVPN advert!
This video has the best intro for an advertisement I've ever seen on CZcams.
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
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?
I do something similar as someone else with autism. Although I use the raised eyebrow emoji more as an "are you sure about that?" rather than a response to to something risqué.
@@phineas7423 Yes! Very much that :)
"????" is an interesting one. For me it conveys misunderstanding and confusion but in a rude way. It reads like I am very much at fault for this confusion, you don't enjoy it and want me to know about that.
I was confused when they said this raised-eyebrow emoji is supposed to mean “confused”. But that might also vary culturally. When I am confused, I frown or don’t change my face at all (which might have to do with me being on the autistic spectrum as well). To me personally, “expressing suspicion” fits this emoji much better. But also what you describe.
I do agree that 🤔 for me does not read as confusion, but rather to proclaim scepticsism. ???? Does seem somewhat aggressive. I would much rather use (?), or try to avoid emoji and similar characters completely. I rarely use emoji at all, and try to avoid tonal ambiguity through rather formal writing
I like how happy you sound during the ad read, presumably for the pride of that genius segue to the ad
I like how you saved the bit about semantic drift until the end. That's one thing about emoji that fascinate me.
Fascinating video, would love to see this topic discussed by more people
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
I'm pretty sure the brackets are more of a eastern Europe thing, not western Europe?
@@nimi5570 yeah, im stupid
Absolutely clean transition to the sponsor didn’t even realise till I saw the piggy bank
That was the best segue into an Ad segment I've ever seen in my life
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.
got me at the "psychopathy" (about 1:20)
the way you just said 'psychopathy' without skipping a beat
i am deceased from laughter
💀🤣🤣🤣💀
That sponsor transition was so flawless I didn’t even see it coming
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.
yes ofc the raising of the eyebrow is still a sign of confusion, I'm just saying that cognitively that's not what's going on in people's heads. think about something like Chinese characters, many of which evolved from pictograms - somewhere along the line they must have lost their pictographic nature and turned into logographs, right? Where does that line go? That's really the question I'm asking.
I don't think you're wrong btw, it's literally a philosophical question with no answer more than anything else
@@kklein I'd say it loses its meaning when you couldn't reasonably expect most people to tell what the symbol is supposed to look like (assuming they don't speak the language but have the necessary cultural baggage to understand what a symbol is if they saw it in real life). Of course that's a fuzzy line, but I'd expect most people (who come from a place where that's a face of confusion) to look at the confused face and recognize the look of confusion while I wouldn't expect people to look at a Chinese character and recognize much of anything.
That does mean that some emojis wouldn't be pictogram for me, those that most people would interpret differently than their intended meaning (I would call that bad design).
I add the cultural baggage claim because a sheep in Burkina looks nothing like a sheep in the UK. So even a photo wouldn't work as a pictogram. Pictograms don't necessarily work across cultural barriers.
@@mnm1273 Would you say that 💾 is a pictogram or an ideogram? I think there is a generational and cultural divide here.
@@mnm1273 but then what is "reasonably expect" 👀, you might understand an emoji that I don't, someone else might understand an emoji you dont - for it to be good design does everyone who looks at it have to understand it? half the people? do we exclude neurodivergent people from this account (that is, after all, what I was talking about in the video)?
@@kklein It's vague because the line is inherently arbitrary when you have a continuous progression. I couldn't put a number on it now. Basically no symbol is truly universal and so being universal can't be the standard. I suppose there's a transition from "good pictogram" to "bad pictogram" to "None pictogram that kind of looks like the original symbol" to "none pictogram".
If I were given money distinguish the limits I'd ask people if they recognized the pictogram and see the success rate then after explaining the symbol ask them to categorise it (one of the four categories) and place the limits of success rates using those data sets. Still it would be fuzzy.
"Neurodivergent" seems like to wide a word to give a yes no answer. If your neurodivergence means you don't understand the concept of the emotions then no I wouldn't take the opinion into account (like if you have no clue what a sheep is I wouldn't ask your opinion on the quality of my sheep emoji). And if you can recognize emotions on faces then of course it's relevant. In between it gets fuzzy.
I agree obviously the lines are arbitrary but that doesn't to me the categories can't be distinct they just have debatable edges, like many human categorisations (even physics has error bars).
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
That's the first time in a while I didn't see an ad roll coming. Well done
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
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!
The introduction to the ad caught me soooo of guard. Super impressed by the clever segue. I didn't even skip it.
That ad transition was so smooth I didn't even skip it 😂
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
See, i would read those as happening one after another, not at the same time 😅
Kinda like talking to someone and they go "huh? *laugh* bleh" .. im guessing a gross joke or something triggered that 😅but yeh one after another not all at the same time
I always used 😁 for psychopathy.
🙂
I’ve been pondering the linguistic purpose of emojis for a long time, so this was really interesting and satisfying to watch! Thanks for putting in the effort to make this fascinating video ☺️
Great analysis. The interoperability between platforms is a nice find.
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've seen a bunch of people /list/ emojis as pronouns, but I've never read a message or post where someone actually addresses someone else using that emoji. since you study the phenomenon, how often do you actually see them be used?
That sounds beyond silly from an outsider's perspective, but it's incredibly intriguing academicly.
That's fascinating. Thank you!
Same with the rise of singular they. It used to only be used when you don't know the gender of the person is unknown, whereas now, it's increased in popularity as a pronoun for non-binary people.
@@Anonymous-df8it as a non-binary, i too find singular they weird.
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".
how would you write it in a more language-agnostic way? I've seen arrows used to mark 1st person vs 2nd/3rd person, but which is which is usually completely random. I think the 2 emoji could also be removed entirely, forcing the dancing emoji to carry the full verb phrase(it could be "i like dancing" or "i like to dance" both ways, though, so continuous vs simple distinction disappeared, assuming thats important)
@@epsi could also take a hint from existing logographic systems and express confirmation and denial through repetition of the verb(in case, for example, your symbols are already being used in a different way):
A: "💃❓" ("Dance?" -> "Do you want to dance?")
B: "💃" or "💃🚫" ("Dance." -> "I do" or "No dance." -> "I dont")
One of the smoothest segues into and add ever!
That segway to the sponsor was so clean! 10/10
6:50 perhaps it could be called Emojian or Emotionese
🙋, 🫵🏙️❓ 👍↔️👎❓
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 😄
LITERALLY the best ad transition I've ever seen. bravo 👏🏻
Best ad transition ever 😂😂 could hear you muffling a laugh as well