Through the Ages
such
✨ language change✨:
the growing nuances of the sparkle emoji Beatrix Livesey-Stephens is a final year undergraduate Language & Linguistics student at the University of Aberdeen. She is an unwavering stan of the sparkle emoji.
If by some chance you unlocked my phone and looked at the emojis I use, would be right at the top of the list. is officially referred to as ‘sparkles’ by the Unicode Consortium, but I affectionately dub it ‘the sparkle emoji‘. I use the sparkle emoji so much, I thought about giving it up as a New Year’s Resolution. I’ve considered becoming an official sponsor of the sparkle emoji on the Unicode Consortium site. But five, six years ago, I didn’t even have access to emoji on my phone. How did I become so linguistically reliant on something that isn’t even a word, and has no spoken equivalent? How and why has the sparkle emoji taken over typographic discourse, and where’s it headed next?
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Adding a sparkle emoji to a collection of other emojis, or even a sentence, makes the net tone of the utterance more positive, arguably always more so than adding the quintessential smiley face ( ) although this can depend on the platform the message is sent on, since emoji are realised differently across platforms and can be subjective in this manner. Consider the following as alternative responses:
🙂
Do you want hot dogs for dinner?
Introspecting on my personal sparkle emoji journey, it specifically took over my use of smiley faces — popular examples being , , or , which correlate exactly to :), :D, and XD, as these emoticons turn into their respective emojis when typed on social media platforms. The sparkle emoji seemed clearer, more carefree, and importantly, more abstract. I felt that I was at much less risk of being misinterpreted over text when I used — after all, there’s only one , and there are 58 yellow smiley emoji. That said, I thought there was only one at the time (spoiler: I was wrong).
🙂😃
😄
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B‘ B‘‘
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Some of my first exposures to the sparkle emoji were with it used as a type of complement to another emoji, in bigrams such as or . The use of as a complement correlates to adding the connotations of common interpretations of the sparkle emoji to the first emoji. Some of these connotations are happiness, light, cleanliness, and other overwhelmingly positive adjectives[1][2]. Emojipedia notes that as with many of the earliest emojis, the design of and these associated meanings were derived from conventions in Japanese manga (comics) and anime, where sparkle-like symbols are often presented either alongside or surrounding a character, object or scene. These sparkles are intended to engender a sense of beauty, novelty, impressiveness, or, in the case of a character, internal joy or happiness[3].
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B
A
🌭 🌭🙂 🌭✨
😊✨
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The use of in B’’) suggests brightness, excitement, and more of an affirmative agreement to have hot dogs for dinner than in B). It is clearly attached as a complement to the emoji that precedes it, and adds specific emotional direction to the tone of the response, rather than just the semantic meaning of the hotdog.
