Emojis, Logograms, and the Future of Our Writing System
In 2015, the English language entered a new era in its history as a written language. For the first time ever, the Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year was not an alphabetically constructed word but rather a logogram, specifically the Face with Tears of Joy (😂) emoji.
Of course, nobody can predict the future and the future of language is truly impossible to predict, but the popularization of emojis in English and other western languages in the past decade (a while after their invention in Japan in the late nineties) might just signify the beginning of an evolution of our written language in a direction that more resembles the very origins of writing itself.
A logogram is a written character that represents a semantic component like a word rather than simply a sound. Historically, this seems to have been the default way of doing it. Pretty much all the world’s original written scripts were logographic, including the cuneiform scripts of the ancient Near East, the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, the oracle bone script from which modern Chinese characters originate, and the pictographic scripts of the Maya, Aztec, and other Mesoamerican civilizations.
Of these scripts and their descendants, only the Chinese variety persists to this day. Today there exists two versions of Chinese characters or hanzi: the simplified version that is predominant in the People’s Republic of China and the traditional (generally more intricate) version that still predominates in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora. The traditional characters are also employed by the Japanese language as well as to a lesser extent in Korea and historically in Vietnam, where only a handful of elderly people are still conversant in them.
The rest of the world has long abandoned logograms. Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform died out in the second century of the Common Era, supplanted by the alphabetic writing system of the Roman Empire. Knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphs persisted until the last of Egypt’s pagan temples were shut down by a zealously Christian Eastern Roman Empire in the fifth century. And as for the pictograms of the Mayas and Aztecs, the Spanish conquistadors who laid siege to these civilizations did everything in their power to eradicate these scripts to the extent that it’s a miracle that any of it survived to be deciphered in the modern era.
But now, logograms are looking to stage a comeback in the form of emoji. History does indeed seem to rhyme rather than repeat.
The Uniquely Japanese Origins of Emoji
It’s not difficult to see why Japan was the natural place for emoji to originate, and not just because it’s a country with an insufferable fixation on all things cute and adorable. Emojis are actually a natural outgrowth of the Japanese written language, which has long functioned as a hybrid system of logographic Chinese characters (kanji) and a phonetic syllabary (kana).
The word “emoji” itself is a compound of three Chinese characters: “絵” or e, which means “picture”, and “文字” or moji, which means “written characters”. If one were to write the sentence “Emojis are fun to use” in Japanese, it would be rendered like this:
絵文字は使うと楽しいです。
As you can see here, there are two distinctly different writing styles in this sentence, one that is logographic and one that is phonetic. In this sentence, the words “emoji”, the verb “to use” (使う, tsukau) and the adjective “fun” (楽しい, tanoshii) are either written entirely with or are anchored by a Chinese character, whereas the verb “is” (です), the verb and adjective endings, and the articles wa (は) and to (と) are written in the phonetic hiragana system.
When typing or texting in Japanese, all the actual keyboard work is done in hiragana (or katakana, a related system used primarily for foreign loanwords). When typing or texting, the software autopopulates kanji characters that fit with any given syllabary. As the Japanese language is rich with homonyms, often multiple choices appear for an individual syllable. For example, the Japanese syllable zen can, with different characters, mean “all” or “everything” (全), “before” (前), or “virtuous” (善) or refer to a school of Buddhism (禅)—and all of these will appear as dropdown options when you key in the hiragana characters ぜん.
(Fun fact: The famous Buddhist temple Zenkōji in the city of Nagano, contrary to what most western visitors assume, has nothing to do with Zen practice, as its name translates to “Temple of Virtuous Light” (善光寺).)
What does this have to do with emojis? Since the origin of modern emoji in 1997 and especially after the introduction of DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile internet in 1999 (the made-in-Japan precursor of the modern smartphone), emoji have functioned exactly the same way as kanji in Japanese software. Type the Japanese word for “cow” (ushi) in hiragana (うし) and you get three character options: 牛, 🐮, and 🐄. Likewise, if you key in “Tokyo” you get both 東京 and 🗼. As such, the sentence “I rode the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka” can be rendered in one of two ways in modern Japanese:
東京から大阪まで新幹線に乗りました。(Tōkyō kara Ōsaka made shinkansen ni norimashita.)
🗼から🏯まで🚅に乗りました。
Witness how emojis turn an already efficient language in terms of character count into an even more efficient one, going from a 17-character sentence to a 13-character one. It’s also perfectly clear, even for a non-native Japanese speaker. Provided the reader can recognize the iconic edifices of Tokyo Tower and Osaka Castle, even somebody with no Japanese comprehension could probably figure out what this sentence means.
Before the advent of modern texting, language arts teachers in Japan could frequently be heard lamenting the decline of Japanese kids’ kanji comprehension, as, for a time at least, hiragana and katakana seemed to be taking over everything. Not so much anymore. Now not only has kanji use been made a whole lot easier through autopopulation, but the Japanese language has also doubled down on its pictographic orientation by providing cute, pithy picture options for common words.
As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that emoji have become equally popular in other Asian countries, and particularly in China, where their popularization has had some interesting consequences. Amid the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between the country’s would-be social and political activists and the Communist Party censors, emojis have been successfully used by activists as a workaround for discussing politically sensitive topics. Sadly, the government has taken notice of this, hence why, for example, the candle emoji (🕯️) is typically censored anytime the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests rolls around, but the game continues.
When Will We Start Writing in Emoji?
Here in the west, we’re still a way off from using emoji in the same way they’re now being used in Asia, as replacements for words rather than word accessories. With the exception of Twitter/X, where character count restrictions influence word choice, in English we tend to use emoji more as punctuation than as word replacements.
But I can already see the beginnings of a shift in this regard. The abbreviation LOL has been in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2011, meaning that it’s a real word now, and more often than not this three-character word is being replaced with the aforementioned one-character symbol 😂. Grammatically, the word LOL has been described by linguist John McWhorter as a “pragmatic article” that denotes empathy, sort of like the Canadian “eh”. Just as the sentence “Pretty cold out, eh?” invites empathy, so too does “My dog stole all my socks 😂”.
We’re already using the various face emojis in a way that invites the reader’s empathy. We might finish the sentence “I got all the way to work before I realized I forgot my laptop” with the 😩 emoji if we want to emphasize the frustrating nature of the situation or the 🤦 emoji if we want to emphasize how stupid we feel. Likewise, we already have various emoji options for congratulating people in place of the rather long word “congratulations”, including 🎉, 🎊, 🏆, and so on, as well as ways of comforting a person through arduous times (😬) or sadness (😢 or 👐).
We’re not yet at the point where we’re replacing nouns and verbs with emojis the way they do in Japan. We’re not yet texting messages like “I’m going 🏠 to see my 👪 for 🎄” followed either by the 😊 or the 😩 emoji, depending on how we personally feel about our family. Not yet, but it’s not far off from what we’re already doing. And when we start doing this, we will have truly transitioned from a purely phonetic writing system to a hybrid phonetic/logographic one. It’s probably only a matter of time.
And while language arts teachers will invariably kvetch about it, I personally think it’s part of the natural evolution of language. We might as well embrace it. 🤷.
The CTA (Because I’m Told You Need One 😂)
As you might deduce from this post, this author not only has good emoji game but is also pretty conversant in Japanese. It’s an ability I’ve done my best to keep up in the decade-plus since returning to Canada from Japan, with some help from Japanese friends, Japanese media, and a bit of AI. My Japanese writing ability is nothing to write home about, but I can certainly translate from Japanese to English quite fluently.
You might be asking yourself (or rather me) this question: why would I need a translator when I can get ChatGPT to do it for free and way faster than any human could do it? To this, I can only say that while Chat is very good, it’s still not a human being and its grasp of idioms, while pretty good for a machine, is incomplete. For example, Chat translated the sentence 坊主にしてください (bōzu ni shite kudasai) as “Please turn me into a monk,” which is what this literally means, but in actual fact is what you would say to your barber when you want your head shaved.
Returning to the theme of this article, Chat also has no emoji moxie. I asked it what 😂 meant and it gave me a very literal explanation, saying that it’s “commonly used to convey laughter, amusement, or to indicate that something is funny or entertaining in digital communication.” This is all factually accurate but not the whole picture, as I discussed earlier, as it’s also an invitation for the reader to empathize with the messenger. That’s like explaining LOL as simply meaning “laugh out loud.” We all know there’s more to it than this.
For anything more nuanced than pure technical writing, you still want a human being doing your translation. You also want a human creating your social media content, which I have a lot of experience doing. Please contact me of any of this is along the lines of what you’re looking for or share with me your ideas for interesting linguistic blog posts. I’d ❤️ to hear your 💭 on any of this stuff 😃!
