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Using Emojis as a Semiotic System
Using Emojis as a semiotic system
In the rapidly developing digital world, people create new means of communication
every day. New languages and representations came into life through texting and chatting
online. Emojis are one of those powerful revolutionary expressions used in communication
and they create meaning. According to the Oxford Dictionary that also chose “Face
with tears of joy” emoji as the word of the year (Danesi, 2016) defines emoji as “a small
digital image used to express an idea or emotion in emails, on the internet, on social media,
etc.”. Danesi (2016) in their book states the Japanese origin of emoji: “e” for picture and
“emoji” for a letter, character. So simply emoji means “picture-word”. In this paper, I’ll
discuss, explain, and exemplify emoji use that depicts language.
Twitter is one of the social media websites that I spend most of my valuable time to
entertain myself, to learn, to criticize, and reflect on my opinions on general matters of life.
In the example below, a well-known football team’s account posted a picture about an elder couple
that used to come to matches together but they passed away. Since I know the story I could
understand the subject. Fenerbahçe put two hearts symbolizing the colors of their theme and
another emoji that might be misinterpreted by some. Folded hands emoji “🙏” has a lot of
meaning. It can be interpreted as a gesture for prayer as we have in this example or it can be
understood as a high-five. Though in Turkey we use that emoji directly for “inşallah” or
“umarım”. So in this example without using words best regards and respects are paid to a
deceased old couple from Fenerbahçe.
In the second example, there is another example from Twitter. Taylor Swift, a popular
successful country singer, and songwriter retweeted a tweet and showed her happiness and
gratitude by using emojis and writing a physical response of hers to the news. “🥺 “pleading
face emoji is used to show gratitude. It’s understood by the following emojis and context of
“best albums of the year”. We can’t just say that person is grateful for the event without
knowing the person’s identity and the context that the person is in. “🥰 🙏 “emojis are used
to complement the feeling of happiness, gratefulness, and happiness. Without even seeing the
other sentences those three emojis are enough to represent the feelings.
Emojis represent feelings and emotions and they are put in the place of words. Emojis
are a world-wide known common language among everyone who uses the internet. For that
reason, I’ve used them on one of my quizzes. It came into my mind when I saw
something similar on the internet and I wanted to recreate it to serve my needs. In that
activity, students had to find the occupations and adjectives that are represented with emojis.
And my 10-year-old students did not have any problems in understanding and writing the
equivalents in the English language. Emojis are so prevalent that this activity didn’t even
surprise them. As I’ve stated before, we use emojis very frequently by replacing words,
feelings, expressions, certain prepositions, and so on.
Jonathon Jones in their article Emoji Is Dragging Us Back to the Dark Ages – and All
We Can Do Is Smile (The Guardian, 2015) states that emojis are like hieroglyphics which is
not wrong at all! We use them to shorten our message, to strengthen or weaken our argument,
or to express more. In the fourth example, the similarity can be seen. People also respond to emojis
(Appendix 5).
A very popular Turkish social content platform Onedio uses an emoji bar under
the news articles for people to reflect on the material that has been read. Sometimes you can see anger because readers are not happy about how the message is conveyed in the article and
sometimes you can see anger because the incident is something that provokes it. Either way
without reading the comments one can’t understand what those happy, angry, and hearty
messages say but it’s a tool that people reflect upon by clicking on the emoji they feel.
Emojis are tiny little expressions that represent various meanings. Another important
aspect is that they represent the identity of the user. In our digital era, feelings and emotions
change every second that we see a new input. And identities are reflected every single step of
the way. When emojis are launched we had only gold/yellow faces. With time to be more
inclusive, emojis are changed. In Appendix 6, it can be seen that one can change the color of
the skin when using the emoji. When you look closely at your keyboards emoji part you can
see male-female and gender-neutral representations of jobs emojis. Some emojis represent
women in hijabs, people with disabilities, and both homosexual and heterosexual couples.
“🧿” emoji is added after requests from Turkish people. If a woman uses 👩 👩 emoji on an
Instagram photo with another woman people might think they are a couple. Emojis carry
cultural, religious, and social identities. If you show Nazar emoji to someone in Europe that
doesn't know the Turkish culture then it might have no meaning. However, posting this emoji
on Facebook to a newborn baby announcement means and represents a lot to Turkish people.
Overall, emojis are widely used representations of feelings, emotions, situations, and
many other things. They are a part of our lives. They continue to evolve and multiply in time.
I don’t want to say that we don’t need to use languages because we have emojis. I want to say
that emojis are a language, that has more meaning and requires a deep understanding.
Great blog. All posts have something to learn. Your work is very good and i appreciate you and hopping for some more informative posts. Esl certification classes
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