how are emojis replacing language? by George Pitassi by George Pitassi

pattern

title page

abstract; Emoji, unless you have been hiding under a rock or are a supreme technophobe it is pretty hard to find yourself avoiding these small characters â&#x20AC;&#x2DC; â&#x20AC;&#x2122; on all forms of text based social media, from text messages to facebook, these small pictograms have become a pivotal change in 21st century social communication, spanning a user base somewhere in the millions, with messages containing emoji somewhere in the billions, surely they must be incrimenting an effect on how we are now using language? Examining origins, semiotics, key theorists and all things emoji, this thesis seeks to answer, how are emojiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s changing language?

“I was working with the sense of creating a new alphabet. It was an attempt to create texts rather than a sense of making pictures.” Shigetaka Kurita, creator of emoji. (Nakano and Lee) Emoji can only be described as the forefront of popular & social communication culture in this the 21st century. Emoji’s are the small collection of pixels that make up the ‘ ‘ ’ in unicode communication i.e. text messaging & word processing.

’ or

Thanks to Shigetaka Kurita who created emoji’s in 1999, these small bundles of pixels now span 2 billion users sending an approximate 41.5 billion messages, containing 6 billion emoji’s each day. [Dua, 2015] But the question to this sensation has to be how are they replacing language? For decades now designers have been developing ways of revolutionizing the way in which we talk to one another on ever progressive apps and devices, nowadays these small images are everywhere and could interestingly be described as modern hieroglyphs. Designers and communicators of visual language have always been challenging the versatility of text with fonts and stylistic drawing from the origins of something as individual as handwriting, but abolishing text completely and designing pictograms to replace text is something which is developing rapidly and is at an all-time popularity but why? To begin searching for answers into this linguistic & anthropological question, we must start by first understanding key theorist’s ideas towards the attraction of using descriptive images as opposed to descriptive text & the origin of modern pictograms in otherwise text driven media.

The origins of emoji are believed to be inspired greatly by the original designer of ideograms, Otto Neurath. Otto Neurath was a Viennese philosopher & social scientist operating in the 1920’s. He and his colleagues created the revolutionary symbolistic communication device known as ideograms, or maybe more easily recognized as the ‘ ’images we now associate with bathrooms, road signs or any other informative image used instead of text, easily understandable short hand images that replace the need of written data/information due to their suggestive/descriptive depictions. [Modern hieroglyphs, 2005] This does not mean however that this original set of ideograms were assumed to be universally understandable, for instance we know as society suggests that the above ideogram of the male and female will suggest male and female bathrooms, but they do not feature a toilet so therefore the suggestion that they are in fact used for bathrooms are totally assumed by its original ‘adopter’ or those who decided the ideograms use, in this instance Cook and Shanosky for the American institute of Graphic Arts 1974 & adopted by the American Department of Transportation as part of a transcribe for modern glyphs. [Modern hieroglyphs, 2005] ’ were a critique of writing that resembled writing, a “Neurath’s ‘ utopian effort to transcend the limitations of letters by exploiting the visual characteristics of typography.” [Modern hieroglyphs, 2005] As the founder of ‘positivism’ Neurath believed that the basic understanding of language was a mixture of rationalism & empiricism, i.e. the idea that we first see things for what they are geometrically/mathematically & then empirically experience them by trying to rationalize them and emote with them.

For instance, the idea that we now popularly understand through reading; THAT IF WE ARE TYPING LIKE THIS WE ARE SHOUTING, and that if we type like this we are calm. This theory promotes further the want for interaction between humans and ideograms because unlike being able to depict foreign languages by understanding letters or perhaps whether they are large in size/scale or not, images can be deduced by rationalizing what they must be. It is the power of these reductive ideograms that make them simple, yet so effective, Ideograms are something which now appear in everyday life from road signs & directions to maps and television remotes, a universal method proven and tried & now adopted and most importantly accepted as part of human understanding, This being said, with ideograms as a basis, and importantly an un emotive basis at that (due to their very diagrammatical and literal nature) how did this idea progress to the next stage of the modern Emoji?

In October 1982, little did he know, but Scott Fahlman was going to change the world of digital communication forever. Continuing on from 1920’s ideograms the year is now 1982 and computer devices & emails are accessible to a large proportion of the electronic consumer market, this meant that many more people were now conversing via email using the QWERTY keyboard, featuring its list of alphabetical characters, numerical keys and punctuation keys. It wasn’t until October 1982 that professor Scott Fahlman posted to an online message board the following transcript;

“19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-) From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c> I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(“ (Microsoft) Unbeknownst to him at the time Fahlman had in fact created and sent the first ‘emoticon’.

As described above the emoticon is the use of creating emotive faces with the punctuation keys on the computers keyboard to contextualise & emphasize the point you are trying to make. It can be best demonstrated by re iterating the example used when mentioning Neurath’s positivism approach of; USING LARGE TEXT TO IMPLY SHOUTING and the idea that this may be construed as serious and angry. However, we can now re direct that sentence using Fahlmans emoticons and create a much more explainable and contextualized sentence by doing the following; I AM USING LARGE TEXT TO SHOUT :) There is an instant difference when using this same sentence with the implication that there is a happy feeling attached to the message in the implied colon/end bracket or paradigmatic ‘smiley face’. The clever part of what Fahlman had produced is something which is literally universally recognizable, all we have to do is perhaps first tilt our head sideways to see that it is in fact a smiley face and then afterwards even upright it is still obvious what we are looking at. In an interview with the New York Times, Fahlman gives an interesting insight into one potential aspect of why emoticons are so popular; “You found that about 10 percent of the tweets in your sample had emoticons in them. Why so many? In a full paragraph, you might be able to express how you’re feeling. But it becomes harder in a tweet, where you only have a few words” (Kennedy, 2014) The idea that the ‘:)’ could so easily explain what many people would struggle to convey in large quantities of text is brilliant, a short hand and emotive way to convey information which caught on globally. One more interesting point from this particular discussion was the international implications of how these punctual ideograms could be developed & how they arguably began to become their own language;

“THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE? Western-style emoticons often read from left to right, as “sideways faces.” Japanese thumb-typists, meanwhile, have invented their own system. m(_ _)m Bowing down in apology (>_<) Ouch!” (Kennedy, 2014) Much like any other credible language, the emoticon had developed with the audience it was interacting with and was a new & exciting way to challenge the use of text and punctuation with culturally driven differences and quirks built from the same original emotive ideology. This again links back to Neurath’s idea of positivism and the empirical understanding of these images & how we as a species enjoy decoding and understanding these new and exciting ways to communicate with one another. Although becoming a worldwide and internet phenomenon and most definitely changing digital communication forever, the :) emoticon language still pales in comparison to the blistering popularity that Shigetaku Kurita’s Emoji now hold over the world and all of its social platforms, but why?

Fast forwarding to the year 1999 we now have the birth of the original concept of the emoji language from the aforementioned Shigetaka Kurita, this came at the same time as the realization of mobile internet. In 1999 the first mobile internet platform was released by NTT DoCoMo in Japan and featured a service named ‘i-mode’. I-mode was quite literally the use of mobile internet on a very small device known as a ‘feature phone’ the device was made up of a non-colored & (importantly) very tiny screen. (Nakano and Lee) Kurita was part of this imode team and thought it was very limiting that the device could only display 48 characters on the screen, which he felt would make it difficult to relay information. So he came up with the idea of using characters or emoticon esque images like Japanese ‘kanji’* instead, which could evidently say more than what phonetically typed words could on such a space limited screen/platform. A very similar if not identical idea to Fahlman, however the important difference was the style of character which Kurita was creating, far more detailed than the original punctuation driven ‘:)’style already known to the world of mobile phone & computer users. “I was working with the sense of creating a new alphabet. It was an attempt to create texts rather than a sense of making pictures. When you communicate on the internet, it is very convenient to have emoji, because it’s hard to express emotions only with text. If you look at history, after handwritten letters, there came the telephone. Then, electronic messaging emerged. There was always a demand for something that can express emotions.” Shigetaku Kurita (Nakano and Lee) When originally created Kurita produced 176 symbols using a 10 pixel by 10pixel limit which spanned a variety of symbols covering everything from emotive faces winking with tongues poking out to food and clothing. This was a huge design step because these images were no longer

limited to being literal ideograms like those designed by Neurath, but becoming more expansive into the realms of pictograms & logograms too. When looking at the semiotics of these characters we can build a further case for emoji being a language and its connections to Lipton and Millers hieroglyphics, without forgetting to mention that Kurita himself had stated in the above passage that he saw emojis as a ‘new alphabet’ solidifying the motive that emoji could become its own language, more of which will be covered in the next section. Continuing from the birth of emoji and its pendulum like effect of popularity - it had become a huge hit in Japan - these characters started to be adopted across a wider Western market. Eventually the real game changer for emoji came to a head, when it was decided that the distribution of the extremely sought after Apple phones was approved in Japan upon the premise that Steve Jobs would make sure that the second generation Apple phone would feature emoji’s, thus bringing it to the entirety of Apple’s market & the Western world! (Nakano and Lee) (page right) chart showing the popularity of emoji spanning different countries. But to really understand why emojis were originally such a big hit in Japan and why Steve Jobs and Apple agreed to such a deal, we must first understand how they work through understanding their semiotic and semantic values.

FIG 1. Emojineering part 1: Machine Learning for Emoji trend

Another linguist like Otto Neurath, Duranti believed that rather than text being a literal translation of what we see, it is our connection and emotion toward what we see that create that emotional experience, like the word love, or the word hate. Our emotions are conducive to what these words translate to from our own experience with them, however the interesting factor of emoji is that although they are interpretive and evoke our empirical senses, they are somewhat self-suggestive because of their pictorial nature. An important point to note is from the earlier quote by Shigetaka Kurita, “because it’s hard to express emotions only with text. If you look at history, after handwritten letters, there came the telephone. Then, electronic messaging emerged. There was always a demand for something that can express emotions.” (Nakano and Lee) This is an important note to take because unlike Neurath’s ideograms or Fahlmans emoticons the emoji is totally self-existent in the respect that as like previously mentioned it is designed around emotion which came to operate on a 10x10pixel ratio as unicode communication (text messages, the internet) but is totally new in its vast delivery of pictograms, ideograms, logograms & emoticons. The size of the emoji catalogue is also important to take into consideration, unlike the textual/punctual keyboard the ability to create new short punchy ‘:)’ faces is limited to the amount of characters and combinations that can be used, and is also only decipherable by the recipient of that message. However, the size of the emoji catalogue gives thousands and thousands of possible combinations which may be interpreted differently in many parts of the world but most importantly still useable and still widely used. Let’s look at the emoji character list for a second (see fig.2 right)

Fig 2. Nakano and Lee. The character’s moods are more obvious in appearance, they speak the human language of emotion far more literally than the emoticon, which is a unique idea, it makes what you say malleable & subject to interpretation, all of which suggest at why emoji may be replacing, at least in part, language, but how is it spoken? Insights into how it is actually used will provide answers to how easy it really is to ‘speak emoji’ So let’s deal with semiotics & semantics. As mentioned earlier the catalogue of emojis is vast and ever growing with a current tally of 845 emojis that span multiple mobile and web based platforms. This gives a large amount of versatility to the language because not only is it available across many platforms which support unicode, but it is also almost unlimited in combination not only as an adage to a sentence, but as its own totally independent ideogram/pictogram displaying informative information or mood, Let’s look below for examples on how emoji can be used in different semiotic structures as an insight to how it is changing & most importantly replacing language. (using techniques influenced by emoji author Fred Benenson whom will be discussed in part 7)

Emojis used as literal translation; Using emoji as a literal translation is the first and most simplistic way of using emoji, For example; ‘I saw a

today’

we still understand this sentence as ‘I saw a cat’ the emoji just replaces the obvious need for the word cat. Emojis used as rebus i.e. replacing a word or part of a word, For example; ‘

’

as a replacement for writing, ‘drink up’ these can be a little hard to decipher and are not always ideal to use but for a seasoned emoji user they can be fast or fun ways of carrying your point & can also be used with the more obvious emojis which include text but deliver an easier example, ‘

’

Less subtle but definitely easier to understand. Emojis used to tell a story using multiple emojis to create a sequence of events which play on the same use as the rebus technique but continue further, For example;

‘

’

Or ‘nice apple watch’ it is a sentence totally created out of emoji, this is again open to one’s personal knowledge and interpretation but looking at the numbers of those using emoji the understanding is something that many are coming to grips with.

But this being said, that emoji is â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;open to interpretationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; begs the question, who exactly is using emoji? Because for it to become its own credible language or replace language we must know the facts and figures of who are spurring this pivotal language change, and to see if there is a big enough driving force to bring emoji into answering our question of whether it is actually replacing language. This brings us to look at who is actually using emoji.

One key factor in questioning whether emoji contains the longevity of replacing or changing language and the way we speak in the future is to look at the statistics of who is actually using them to try and forecast the proposed user base & to see if enough people are actually using it to create a change in communication traits. As previously stated there are 2 billion smart phone users worldwide with an approximate 41.5 billion messages & 6 billion emoticons sent per day. Recently one company looked at researching into whether replacing bank pin codes with emoji’s would create a safer and more efficient way of keeping our data safe, this would be something they would target to ‘Generation Y’ or ‘Young Millennials’ i.e. those born post 1990. Their research showed that 64% of Millennials regularly communicate only using emoji’s, so doing the math for an idea of just how many people that statistic covers for Millennials in the US alone equates to a staggering 83.1 million people. (Hern, 2015) Calculating further shows that, that is 53.1 million US Millennials communicating solely through totally emoji based messages. Second to this Instagram shared that almost 40% of text comments now contain emoji, this is on a service which has a user base of 300 million with 70% of those users coming from outside the US, that is a further 120 million emoji users worldwide on Instagram alone. (Woollaston, 2015) That is without taking into account Facebook and Twitter users along with iMessage users. So using the small segment of the grand scheme of social figures we have, we can still see that a substantial & staggering part of the world’s population are communicating using emoji meaning this must be having an effect on global communication and the way we are communicating with one another. If we took into account that 53.1 million people in the US alone are communicating solely through emoji and didn’t think it could have a lasting effect on language, then we must put that figure into perspective,

53.1 million as a population would land it as the 27th highest population in the world above countries such as South Korea, South Africa, Australia all of whom have recognized languages noticed and recognized by the rest of the world. This is example is to show that the global 6 billion messages sent containing emoji per day must be having an effect on language, if not enhancing text communication, then replacing text conversation. Recently Instagram did a separate study into how many of its users used emoji to grasp whether it was worthwhile allowing emoji’s to be recognized as ‘hash tags’ the # hashtag is used to tag posts with words making them easy to locate for user searches. Upon researching they found out some staggering information. (Emojineering part 1: Machine Learning for Emoji trend, no date) “Instagram’s decision to enable the hashtagging of emojis was also prompted by numbers — with nearly half of all Instagram posts containing at least one emoji.” (Emojineering part 1: Machine Learning for Emoji trend, no date) The information collected by Instagram researches not only user base but language habits & the notion that emoji are actually replacing slang, or short hand speak i.e. ‘lol’ meaning laugh out loud & other short hand internet and text slang which were far more popular in the era of Fahlmans aforementioned emoticons.

FIG 3 (above) Fig 4 (right). Emojineering part 1: Machine Learning for Emoji trend

The Charts from Instagram show a staggering rise for the popularity of emoji use in correlation to the decline of slang use over recent years, The above chart shows us that emojis are now far more popular than the use of slang. But also that emojis are often used in conjunction with slang, this may be to emphasise a comment or to complement one another. It is plain to see that the popularity of emoji is nothing short of a phenomenon and one that continues to progress, because they are largely being accepted by developers such as apple when looking back to the Japan distributing emoji deal which pivoted on Steve Jobs allowing the second generation of the most sought after communication device in the world to include emoji. Alongside this the emoji application is now being featured on programs like Microsoft word. It seems that our affiliation with emoji is becoming the norm and that we are developing taste when it comes to seeing them with favorite and most popular emojis become everyday â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;wordsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and phrases. Now we have an insight into just how many people are using emoji and how widely reciprocated that has been on social media, what about their legitimacy as words?

The one pivotal factor in any new words or language to decide its legitimacy is acceptance into credible and noted archives such as dictionaries and congress, institutions that have been documenting officially recognized languages for hundreds of years, but do emoji qualify? The first example of emoji being used in a legitimate context is in a unique and groundbreaking book which has recently been published by author Fred Benenson, Benenson is as unique as authors get because he is currently the only published author of an entirely emoji based book, a retelling of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, aptly named Emoji Dick.

FIG 5. Emoji Dick, Benenson, F.

“The story behind Moby-Dick is about this huge, seemingly insurmountable challenge, told using metaphors and stylized language,” he said. “And in a way, that’s what translating a book into emoji is—a weird, huge challenge told in metaphors and stylized language. I also really like the whale emoji, so that seemed like a good fit, too.’ – Fred Benenson

(History, travel, arts, science, people, places I Smithsonian, no date)

It is interesting to note from a design point of view Benenson’s views of how he is using emoji as a stylized language to tell a story, much like an artist or illustrator producing an image with a narrative behind it, Benenson is using this new language to re tell a story using pictograph’s and ideograms which need to be creatively challenged to produce his desired outcome of a readable story. This is groundbreaking for emoji for two reasons, one because the crowdfunded book was written in the entirely new language of emoji & secondly that the book was officially accepted into the US library of Congress, which houses many translated versions of Moby Dick and has accepted this particular version as a credible piece of literature. (History, travel, arts, science, people, places I Smithsonian, no date) This was the first sign that the emoji language was developing on from an internet trend to a credible use of language, whether it be satirical or not its legitimacy was credited which takes it from being what could arguably be called a trend or a fad. Secondly and most importantly for emoji, is the idea that they can be recognized as words, be it pictograph, pictogram, ideogram, hieroglyphic or character, the emoji language must be applicable as a language to have the longevity to answer our question of whether they will be able to replace language. “We continually monitor the Corpus and the Reading Programme to track new words coming into the language: when we have evidence of a new term being used in a variety of different sources (not just by one writer) it becomes a candidate for inclusion in one of our dictionaries. For every new dictionary or online update we assess all the most recent terms that have emerged and select those which we judge to be the most significant or important and those which we think are likely to stand the test of time” Oxford Dictionary

(‘How do you decide if new words should enter Oxford Dictionaries?’)

Above is the answer to how the Oxford dictionary instates a word to become officially recognized as part of the English language. The main points to take from the above statement are that the terms must be the most significant, important, or that are likely to stand the test of time.

This was researched due to the second part of this look into emoji’s legitimacy, because as recently reported by the Oxford Dictionary themselves, the most used word of 2015 is…..

FIG 6 Dictionaries, 2015

‘

’

an emoji. The Oxford Dictionary teamed up with leading mobile business Swiftkey to track frequency and usage statistics to find the most used text/unicode in the world and found that not only is ‘ ’ the most popular but that it made up 20% of all emojis used in the UK in 2015 and 17% in the US. One other point to note is the spike in popularity of the word ‘emoji’ having been traced back to being used in English since 1997 its use has reportedly tripled in 2015. (Dictionaries 2015) The post refers to “the most used word of the year being a ‘pictograph’” which is again another interesting sentence to dissect because although the emoji is being referred to as a pictograph, it is also recognized as a word, by the Oxford Dictionary which is a huge impact on the argument of emoji developing as a language. So with all of the research, history and contemporary statistics in hand, can we produce an opinion on our question, how are emojis replacing language?

FIG 7. Emojineering part 1: Machine Learning for Emoji trend *with regards to 300 million total Instagram users

In conclusion and starting with the quote above from the Instagram research team, the fact they mention that emoji are becoming a valid and near-universal method of expression in all languages is a very strong insight into how they may be replacing language. The fact that emoji first started as a short hand speak to save space on a screen to now being available on almost every digital platform shows an expediential growth in global popularity. One reason may be because the language of emotion is in fact universal, it is something we are all built with, something that everybody can understand yet not something that everyone can portray, which is where emoji replacing language comes into its own. “they make communication easier. Is it not easier to send a smiley face than tell someone you like them? Is there not less room for mis-interpretation when we send a picture over a text?” - Kelly Cavanagh (Is Technology Changing the way we Talk? Replacing conversation with emoji’s 2015) Kavanagh hits the nail on the head with her statement that it is arguably ‘easier’ to send a smiley face because not all of us are born with the inherit ability to woo somebody with words or descriptively explain what it is we are feeling, so much like a psychiatrists Rorschach test we find the image which relates to our emotion the best in the form of an emoji and send it, otherwise replacing the irrespective written language or words we would usually send. “Emoji are now available to you as an optional written language, just like any global language, such as Arabic and Catalan and Cherokee and Tamil and Tibetan and English. You’ll find an emoji keyboard on your iPhone, nestled right between Dutch and Estonian.” - Adam Sternbergh (Sternbergh, 2014) Finally, to concur with Sternbergh, it is evident that emoji is everywhere, yet the question of whether it is replacing language is largely individual, the statistics are there to show that they are replacing large proportions of written language, albeit digitally anyway.

Though emoji will remain a constant in this the age of digital communication, they can never expand beyond exactly that, the digital. When asking the question how are emoji replacing language? We can see that they are replacing the written language on text based communication formats with their expressive and simply executed armory of emotive, descriptive and fun pictograms. But, they can never really replace language totally because language is something we speak, as well as write & emotion is something we feel, it is human nature and that can never be totally replaced with a text based set of emotions. Ultimately Shigetaku Kurita created something that had to exceed his wildest dreams with emoji, and with an emoji now being the most used word in the world as recognized by the Oxford Dictionary, it is clear that emoji is in it for the long haul as a social communication benchmark of the 21st century and is only gaining more momentum with smart phones and the internet becoming more and more globally accessible, The main string to its bow, is that much like language, it is infinite, there is always a new designer to create a new emoji, as images are arguably more infinite & instant to produce than whole new words, this means that ultimately emoji have the longevity to span new social platforms and move with ever developing trends. However regardless of this argument, they are here, they arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t going anywhere & only will tell what will happen next with the tour de force that is, emoji.

Benenson, F ‘Emoji Dick Paperback’ (2012) ASIN:B0093087DU Dictionaries, O. (2015) ‘Oxford dictionaries word of the year 2015 is… I OxfordWords blog’, Oxford Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Available at: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/11/word-ofthe-year-2015-emoji/ (Accessed 20 December 2015) Dua, T. (2015) Emojis by the numbers: A Digiday Data Dump, Brands. Digiday. Available at: http://digiday.com/brands/digiday-guide-things-emoji (Accessed: 8 January 8, 2016) Duranti, A. (ed.) (2009) Linguistic Anthropology: A reader – 2nd edition. 2nd edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell (an imprint of John Wiley & Sons Ltd). ISBN-10: 1405126329 Hern, A. (2015) ‘Are emojis going to replace pin codes?’, The Guardian, 16 June. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/15/ emojis-pin-numbers-passcodes (Accessed: 2 January 2016) History, travel, arts, science, people, places I Smithsonian (no date) Availabe at: http://www.smithsonianmag,com/ist/?next=/arts-culture/text-me-ishmael-reading-moby-dick-emoji-180949825/ (Accessed: 8 January 2016) ‘How do you decide if new words should enter Oxford dictionaries?’ (no date) Oxford Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Available at: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/how-donew-words-enter-oxford-dictionaries (Accessed: 8 January 2016)

Instagram (No Date) ‘Emojineering part 1: Machine learning for Emoji trends’ Available at: http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/117889701472/emojineering-part-1-machine-learning-for-emoji (Accessed 8 January 2015) Is Technology Changing the way we Talk? Replacing conversation with emoji’s (2015) Available at; http://www.ignitemr.com/is-technology-changing-the-way-we-talk-replacing-conversation-with-emojis/ (Accessed: 03 November 2015) Kennedy, P. (2014) ‘Who made that Emoticon?’, Magazine, 26 August. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/whomade-that-emoticon.html (Accessed: 5 January 2016). Microsoft, (no date) ‘The First Smiley :-)’. Available at: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/mbj/ Smiley/Smiley.html (Accessed: 7 January 2016) Miller, A. J. and Lipton, E. (1999) Design writing research: Writing on graphic design. London: Phaidon Press. Modern Hieroglyphs (2005). Available at: https://visualizedata.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/modern_hieroglyphs.pdf (Accessed: 10 December, 2015) Nakano, M. and Lee, M. I. (no date) Why and how I created Emoji. IGNITION. Available at: http//ignition.co/105 (Accessed: 17, November 2015)

Sternbergh, A (2014), Smile you’re speaking Emoji, The Rapid Evolution of a Wordless Tongue Available at: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/11/emojis-rapid-evolution.html (Accessed 04 November 2015) Telegraph, M, B. A., Koblin, A., Searls, D. and Whale, Or the (no date) Emoji Dick. Available at: http://www.emojidick.com/ (Accessed: 8 January 2016) Woollaston, V. (2015) ‘Are emojis killing off the alphabet?’, Daily Mail, 6 May.Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3070135/Are-emoji-killing-alphabet-Instagram-maps-use-icons-replacing-internet-slang-words.html (Accessed 14 December)

Nakano, M. and Lee, M. I. (no date) Why and how I created Emoji. IGNITION. Available at: http//ignition.co/105 (Accessed: 17, November 2015)

Benenson, F ‘Emoji Dick Paperback’ (2012) ASIN:B0093087DU

Dictionaries, O. (2015) ‘Oxford dictionaries word of the year 2015 is… I OxfordWords blog’, Oxford Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Available at: http://blog.oxforddictionaries. com/2015/11/word-of-the-year-2015-emoji/ (Accessed 20 December 2015)

spread