✨ emoji linguistics ?! 👁️ 👄 👁️ ✌️

inescapable 😩 meaningful 🤔 and maybe a little TOO versatile 🤪

In 2016, everyone was tweeting about Trump — and Cher was certainly no exception.

In the span of about 4 months between April and May, the famed “Goddess of Pop” tweeted 815 times, sprinkling in a grand total of 2093 emojis. Out of those tweets, 122 of them contained her second-most used emoji: a toilet.¹

From Parkwell (2019).

The translation for this tweet seems pretty straightforward at first. Just a simple lexical replacement, right? Swap out the picture of the toilet with the word “toilet,” swap out the picture of money with the word “money,” and you’re good to go.

But it’s not always this easy.

From Parkwell (2019).

In this tweet, the toilet returns, but as a stand-in to represent Trump himself. At least now, because of the first tweet, we have some awareness of Cher’s mental link between Trump + toiletness, enough to know to swap out “toilet” (or perhaps “toilet fire”?) with the name “Trump.”

Oh, and “tree” + “branch” with “green.” And “gun” + “coffin” with “gun violence.” But “world” is still “world.” And the shocked gaspy face is definitely just a shocked gaspy face conveying shocked gaspiness.

As Cher’s tweets demonstrate, emojis now play a critical role in how we make meaning in our modern world. They help us display emotion, soften or heighten the intensity of our message, act as lexical stand-ins, convey humor, and more. And sometimes they do… a little too much. (See Chevy’s 2015 campaign, #ChevyGoesEmoji, below.)

No, no, no. It’s too much. I hate it. I’m sorry.

(By the way, I don’t know if the plural form of “emoji” should be “emoji” or “emojis.” Part of me feels that the world would say “emoji,” but I’m saying “emojis” because that’s what feels better to me. If you disagree, it’s all good! I think we’re still sorting that out as an English-speaking collective.)

Below are three more observations about how emojis shape our textual world.

Emojis serve a wide range of pragmatic functions.

There have been many attempts to identify the pragmatic functions of emojis, because there are a LOT of them. Yus (2014) narrowed it down to 8, and researchers since then have expanded this taxonomy even further (no doubt due to innovative emoji-users like Cher). Here are a few of these functions:

Signaling, intensifying, or mitigating a feeling.

• Signaling:

  • A carton of eggs costs $6 🤯 (crazy! how is that possible? wow!)

  • A carton of eggs costs $6 😇 (here’s my response to your question! hope it’s helpful!)

• Intensifying:

  • I’m a little annoyed that she didn’t show up 🫠🫠🫠

  • That’s nice of you 🥰

• Mitigating:

  • Please don’t forget to submit your work before midnight, it’s urgent! 💃🏻💃🏻

  • I’m actually so mad at her 🙈

Contradiction for the sake of humor or irony.

• If he forgets to pick up my coffee I’m going to kill him 😇

• I hate you 😘

Interactional devices.

• Backchanneling (like when we add “mm-hms” and “wows” to show we’re listening) is replaced with reactions like 😮 or 👍 to show we’re following along.

• Turn-taking is also signaled through emojis (this one is similar to backchanneling, but lets the recipient know that they’re next up in the text sequence).

In-group signaling.

A more complicated use of emojis is to signal in-group membership, typically that of political and ideological groups. These symbols might appear next to your name or in your bio on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Here are a few of these as documented by KnowYourMeme². The more you know!

• 🌹 (rose) - socialism

• 🥛 (glass of milk) - alt-right, Nazism, White nationalism

• 🦅 (eagle) - neoconservatism, pro-military intervention

• 🕊️ (dove) - anti-military intervention

• 🐝 (bee) - Pete Buttigieg supporters

• 🧢 (blue cap) - universal basic income supporter, OR Andrew Yang supporter

• 🍑 (peach) - impeachment

Emojis both expand and limit our expression (and we’re getting creative).

Stark and Crawford (2015)³ point out that while emojis have provided us with a wide range of options for emotional expression, they also trap us in a “normcore system of emotion” (Crawford, 2014). Something about them certainly feels expressive, but there is also something distinctly sterile and corporate about them. In other words,

“Emoji are an exuberant form of social expression but they are also just another means to lure consumers to a platform, to extract data from them more efficiently, and to express a normative, consumerist, and predominantly cheery world-view. Where can resistance be found?” (Stark & Crawford, 2015, p. 8)

Ge-Stadnyk (2021) might argue that one form of resistance could be found in the emoji sequence — or, when users string together multiple emojis to form their own customized meanings.⁴ This can be useful to convey complex messages that go beyond just one emoji, and help us express our own personality.

For example, this Twitter user created an emoji sequence to emphasize the text of their tweet, while simultaneously providing some aesthetic embellishment (that gives us a hint as to their feelings on the matter) —

From Ge-Stadnyk (2021).

Gen Z is also notorious for their own hand-crafted emoji sequences that carry a distinctly “Gen Z” vibe.

Some of these include 👁️ 👄 👁️ , which can be used to represent a wide range of emotions based on its context: shock, surprise, staring, wonder, or “it is what it is.”

Two fingers touching, like 👉 👈 , is commonly used to indicate shyness, meekness, or innocence (most often in a humorous manner, and commonly paired with the “pleading” 🥺 expression).

So while emojis reside somewhere between “limitless emotional expression!” and “corporation-dictated representations of what we are supposed to think about and feel,” there is still much wiggle room for us to craft meaning that makes sense to us, and aligns more closely with who we are.

Emoji use can even bring about non-linguistic benefits.

As the New York Times declares, “We’re living in the age of Slack rage.” But could those rant texts to your co-worker scattered with angry emojis actually be helpful?

In a 2022 study of the emoji use patterns of Github developers’ work-related activities, researchers found that developers who used emojis in their posts were significantly less likely to drop out of working on the platform.⁵ In virtual work spaces, where it’s harder to interact your co-workers on a regular basis, emojis can act as a visual display of your affect.

Interestingly, negative emojis — like those conveying anger or sadness — are especially helpful. For one, they send a signal to co-workers and higher-ups that you’re having a negative experience at work, leading to a higher chance that someone will intervene before you burn out or quit. They also can help you let out pent-up emotions surrounding work like stress or anxiety.

So if you’re on Slack and feel your mouse hovering over an angry face — use it! The researchers in this study assert that even in a work setting, “expressing any emotion, even negative emotions with emojis is better than expressing no emotion at all.” Let it out 😤 😤 😤

Thanks for reading!

Have you found any other intriguing uses of emojis in your world? Sound off in the comments below and I’ll see you next Tuesday.

1. Parkwell, C. (2019). Emoji as social semiotic resources for meaning-making in discourse: Mapping the functions of the toilet emoji in Cher’s tweets about Donald Trump. Discourse, Context & Media, 30.

2. https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/field-guide-to-political-emojis

3. Stark, L. & Crawford, K. (2015). The Conservatism of Emoji: Work, Affect, and Communication. Social Media + Society, 1.

4. Ge-Stadnyk, J. (2021). Communicative functions of emoji sequences in the context of self-presentation: A comparative study of Weibo and Twitter users. Discourse & Communication, 15(4), 369–387.

5. Lu, X., Ai, W., Chen, Z., Cao, Y., & Mei, Q. (2022). Emojis predict dropouts of remote workers: An empirical study of emoji usage on GitHub. PLoS ONE, 17(1), e0261262.