DOI 10.

1515/css-2019-0015  Chinese Semiotic Studies 15(2): 243–258

Marcel Danesi*
Emojis: Langue or Parole?
Abstract: The phenomenon of emojis has had many implications for the future
course of writing, literacy, communications, and the nature of representation
itself. This paper looks at the implications of emoji use through the filter of
Saussurean semiotics and through the lens of theories of visuality, which claim
that visual writing is having radical effects on literacy and cognition. The histor-
ical background to the rise of visual writing is used as a backdrop to the semiot-
ic analysis of the emoji phenomenon. The way we read and write messages
today with visual elements such as emoji may indicate a radical shift away from
a linear mode of processing information, as imprinted in alphabetic forms of
writing, toward a more holistic and imaginative mode. However, because emoji
usage and creativity depend on specific technologies, it remains to be seen if
such writing can survive as technologies change. The main argument in this
paper is that emojis are more part of parole than they are a separate langue, but
they nonetheless reveal changes that the latter is undergoing in an age of digital
multimodal communication.

Keywords: alphabets; literacy; visuality; writing


*Corresponding author: Marcel Danesi, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada,
e-mail: marcel.danesi@utoronto.ca

1 Introduction
Emojis spread throughout the world after they became broadly available on
keyboards, apps, websites, etc. with the launch of Unicode 8 in 2015; and the
emoji lexicon is constantly being enlarged in response to changing needs and
trends across languages and cultures. It has become obvious that emojis can no
longer be considered an ancillary set of picture words for sprucing up informal
written messages. They are being used in all areas of social discourse, from
advertising to political campaigning. Their growing importance was
acknowledged in 2015 when the Oxford Dictionary chose, as its “Word of the
Year,” the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji:

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Figure 1: Face with tears of joy emoji

On its website, the Dictionary justified its choice of an emoji over a traditional
phonetic word by claiming that it “captures the ethos, mood, and
preoccupations” of the contemporary world. Clearly, the spread of emojis
harbors a broad range of implications, from the possible demise of traditional
print literacy practices to the evolution of communicative systems and practices
that are being shaped more and more by socio-technological forces. A central
semiotic question that emojis raise takes us to the doorstep of Saussure (1916):
Are emojis a new langue or a new form of parole constrained to specific kinds of
digital texts? The emoji phenomenon actually presents us with a “case study”
for examining the Saussurean dichotomy and his belief that the two – langue
and parole – were not mutually reciprocal systems, but autonomous ones. As
will be argued in this paper, emojis appear to collapse this dichotomy – a topic
that has become of crucial importance today amid the many revisitations of
Saussurean theory and method (Harris 2001; Sanders 2004; Bouissac 2010;
Joseph 2012; Thibault 2013; Weber 2017). Emojis also seem to eliminate the
traditional distinction between separate verbal and visual modes of
representation and communication – that is, between verbality and visuality.
Saussure himself (1916: 68, 112) had suggested that verbal language was “the
most complex and universal,” and that this was so because “There are no pre-
existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.” The
sustainability of this premise is clearly testable as well in terms of the emoji
movement.

2 Background
An important factor in the rise and spread of emojis is the modern historical
context that preceded their emergence (Danesi 2016). It is unlikely that these
picture words would have emerged in the first place if modern-day people were
not pre-conditioned to accept them as an outgrowth of various trends that took

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 Emojis: Langue or Parole?  245

shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of these is the
comic book, which blends images and words in a narrative framework. Artistic
movements such as Dada, Futurism, among others, also showed that the
printed (phonetic) word, laid out in a linear fashion, was losing its primacy in
the domain of written communication. The writer-mathematician Lewis Carroll
was already experimenting with visual-iconic writing in the middle part of the
nineteenth century, as can be seen in the layout of his “Mouse’s Tale,” which
appears in his novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The layout
resembles the physical form of a “tail,” a word which is a homograph of “tale”:

Figure 2: Lewis Carroll’s “The Mouse’s Tale” (Wikimedia Commons)

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Attempts to make writing more visual can also be seen in an 1881 issue of Puck
Magazine, a now defunct humor magazine. Its suggestions prefigure modern-
day emoticons:

Figure 3: Puck Magazine (1881)

The intellectual and social groundwork for emojis was thus laid by trends such
as these. The relevant digital technology came forth simply to provide the
physical tools to realize emoji writing in a user-friendly way. Of course, visuality
in writing practices existed before the modern era, as can be seen in medieval
and Renaissance rebus forms of writing, illustrated manuscripts, and the like.
But these did not spread because of the effort, expense, and artistic talent that
was involved in realizing them. Digital keyboards, websites, and apps, on the
other hand, have made visuality an option easily available to everyone.
It is also relevant to note that emojis as such did not emerge in a
representational vacuum. They are an end-point in the evolutions of emoticons
and kaomoji. Without going into the historical details here, since they are well
known (Danesi 2016; Evans 2017), a linear path can be traced from the latter two
to emoji, as shaped by developing technologies. This path can be shown as
follows:

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 Emojis: Langue or Parole?  247

Figure 4: Evolution from emoticon to emoji

An emoticon represents a facial expression iconically with combinations of

keyboard characters, including punctuation marks, numbers, and letters.
Emoticons have been traced as far back as the early 1970s. The word kaomoji
refers to Japanese emoticons. These came to prominence in the mid-1980s,
migrating to other orthographic systems for a while. Finally, the first emoji was
created in Japan in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, who was likely using kaomoji as a
prototype, creating stock symbols to stand for all kinds of referents, not just
faces.
The notion of visuality was discussed at length by Rudolf Arnheim (1969),
who challenged the traditional differentiation between “thinking” (associated
with language) and “perceiving” (associated with art), claiming that the two
have been artificially separated, since they both co-occur in the processing of
messages. Visuality has been studied extensively under the rubric of visual
semiotics (Barthes 1977; Krampen 1991; Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1994; Jappy
2013). The focus in this branch has been largely (albeit not exclusively) on how
visual signifiers such as points, lines, and shapes cohere into meaning
structures such as signs and texts. Arrows, for example, are indexical signs that
allow spatial and orientational representation. Shapes represent the outline of
something iconically – a circle can stand for the sun or the face; a rectangle can
represent the surface of a table; and so on. So, in drawings of scenery, a cloud
can be represented as a shape, and the horizon as a line. Other visual signifiers
include value, color, and texture. Value refers to the darkness or lightness of a
line or shape. Color conveys mood, feeling, and atmosphere. Texture refers to
the phenomenon that certain visual signifiers evoke tactile and other sensory
modalities – wavy lines tend to elicit pleasant sensations, whereas angular ones
tend to elicit opposite reactions. Emojis embody all these representational
modalities (to varying degrees). For this reason, they cannot be studied in the
same way as images in terms of signifier status. They are meaningful units in
themselves – hence their designation as picture words.
It is relevant to note that the earliest pictographs were not true
reproductions of their referents; they were mainly outlines or sketches of them,
as can be seen in the carvings of animals which cover the roofs and walls of
ancient caves. The work of Schmandt-Besserat (1978, 1989, 1992) has shown, in
fact, that the first writing symbols were probably made possible from the

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creation of clay tokens, which seem to be image-reproducing objects, much like

molds or type-setting stamps. It is not a stretch to say that the emoji keys of
today have retrieved the same kind of function of these clay tablets.

3 Emojis as langue
Saussure defined langue as a system of abstract rules used by a speech
community, in contrast to the actual linguistic behavior of the individuals in
that community, which he designated as parole. Langue involves what Chomsky
(1957) called a linguistic competence and the abstract rules that realize it a
generative grammar – that is, a set of rules that people use unconsciously to
generate sentences. Leaving aside the theoretical problems associated with the
Saussurean-Chomskyan paradigm, for the present purposes the key question
that emojis elicit is whether or not they involve a grammar that is analogous to
linguistic grammar and thus whether or not they constitute a veritable langue in
the Saussurean sense.
The problem with ascribing emojis to the Saussurean domain of langue is
that there seem to be no linguistic-type rules underlying their assemblage in
texts. Rather, they appear to entail a type of visual sign system that is based on
episodic, rather than purely linguistic, representation – that is, a system
consisting of a series of connected referents that constitute an unconscious
narration. So, rather than a strictly linguistic competence, emoji competence
can be called simply, episodic, since it involves the ability to understand visual
sequences, as in a comic book, and their interrelations through the practical
experience of the events that the sequences encode. Unlike Chomsky’s
Universal Grammar (Chomsky 2002), episodic competence is not based on a
minimal set of structural rules, such as recursion, but on the experiential
visualization and memory of events. An example of how episodic competence
might unfold, consider the text below, which is now a famous meme in Internet
culture found on many public domain websites. The intent of the text is actually
enunciated at the top in words – “Dude, let’s rob a bank.”
The emoji units and sequences, arranged in list form, are laid out from top
to bottom in terms of episodic events, providing a response to the exhortation to
rob a bank. This vertical layout describes the unfolding of events in a sequential
way. The top line portrays the sequence in temporal order: gun (the weapon for
robbing the bank) + money bag (the booty) + car (escape vehicle). The grinning
face emoji below constitutes an unsure and precarious reaction to the sequence.
The third line then describes what might happen next – namely, police cars will

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 Emojis: Langue or Parole?  249

be summoned to the scene, followed in the subsequent fourth line by a

frowning face as a reaction to their arrival. The fifth line then portrays the likely
scenario that will then unfold: guns (the shooting that will take place between
the robbers and the police) + fire truck + ambulance (indicating the usual order
of the arrival of these emergency vehicles, suggesting a possibility of injury).
The last emoji is a double dizzy face, which is an expression of anxiety. The
final query – “So that’s a no then?” – is the sender’s conclusion that he draws
from the emoji sequences of his interlocutor. This message is decipherable in
terms of what has been called an episodic system of understanding shaped by
the experiential knowledge of a typical robbery scene, which provides an
interpretative frame for decoding the text. In effect, the episodes read much like
a television crime program. Without this knowledge, the message would
become open to different interpretations or even be completely undecipherable
in, say, a tribal culture where guns and robberies make no sense as sign forms.

Figure 5: “Dude let’s rob a bank” (EverythingFunny.org)

As this kind of text brings out, understanding and constructing an emoji text is
different from a phonetically laid out one. The latter involves knowledge of
phonemics (and their graphemic counterparts), grammatical structure, and
vocabulary choices. An emoji text does not – it is visual, not phonemic, episodic

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rather than grammatical, and its vocabulary is multimodal (involving iconicity

and indexicality). Needless to say, the same message could be told with words
instead. But the emoji counterpart is more broadly understandable than the
same message written in some specific language, since it does not require the
grammatical and lexical competence of that language. So, the question of
ascribing emojis to the domain of langue, as defined by Saussure, is a
problematic one. Langue involves abstract (unconscious) knowledge of rule-
making principles. Now, while this criterion is not applicable to emojis, the fact
that their usage is broadly understandable does indeed seem to make them a
kind of langue, but one that is distinctive from a linguistic langue in the
Saussurean-Chomskyan sense.
A comparison between emojis, which are picture words, and phonetic
words is thus essential in determining whether or not emojis constitute a langue.
Phonetic words can be defined by their formal morpholological structure and by
their referential purview – as nouns, verbs, etc. A similar kind of classificatory
process seems to apply to emojis. A cloud emoji, for instance, is likely to be
perceived as a noun corresponding to the word cloud. A sunrise emoji, on the
other hand, showing the shape of a sun as it rises up from a background, can
suggest either the noun sunrise or a verb describing the rising of the sun:

Cloud emoji Sunrise emoji

Figure 6: Emoji types

Now these very same emoji forms could be used to describe something in a
written text (such as a cloudy mood or a sunny disposition), thus functioning
also as adjectives. In the cloud emoji, the grayish-white color can also be used
in messages to suggest various emotions (such as dullness or boredom); on the
other hand, the sunrise emoji might suggest an uplifting of emotions or
something similar. In effect, specific emojis cannot be assigned monolithically
to a part of speech, because they blend several parts, with one or the other
being foregrounded on the basis of the context. This makes it difficult to
pigeonhole an emoji morphologically. Nonetheless, emojis have the same kind
of referential functions of morphemes, albeit in more extensive ways.
Rather than speak of words as morphological classes, it is perhaps more
relevant to use Edward Sapir’s (1921) notion of words as manifestations of a
“vocabulary blueprint” in the human brain that allows speakers of different

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 Emojis: Langue or Parole?  251

languages to communicate the same ideas with the specific vocabulary

resources at their disposal. To show this, he got speakers of several indigenous
languages of the southwestern United States to render the English sentence He
will give it to you in their respective languages (Sapir and Swadesh 1946):

Table 1: Equivalents between English and several Indigenous American Languages

Language ‘He will give it to you’ Structure in English

Wishram a-Â-i-m-l-úd-a will-he-him-you-to-give-will
Takelma ök-t-xpi-nk will-give-to-you-he or they
South Paiute maya-vaania-aka-ana-mi give-will-visible thing-visible creature-you
Yana ba-ja-ma-si-wa-numa round thing-away-to-does-unto-you
Nootka o-yi-aqλ-at-eik that-give-will-done unto-you are
Navaho n-a-yi-diho-a you-to transitive-will-round thing

The fact that the English sentence was so easily translated by speakers of the
above languages, despite differences in actual vocabulary and linguistic
grammar, gives substance to Sapir’s claim of a vocabulary blueprint. A specific
vocabulary might include information that may be excluded by others, or else it
may eliminate details that others consider relevant to messages. In English, for
instance, we must indicate the gender of the actor (masculine he) and the object
(neuter it), as well as the number (singular in this case), and tense of the verb
(future in this case will give). We do not need to indicate, as speakers of some of
the other languages above need to do, the size or shape of the object, whether or
not it is visible, or whether the action was observed by the speaker. In sum,
Sapir’s notion can be applied to the emoji lexicon, which also seems to realize
the brain’s vocabulary blueprint but in visual, rather than strictly verbal, ways
The term emoji code is often used in theoretical discussions of emojis,
perhaps to avoid the formal requirements that langue entails. The term was
actually introduced by Saussure (1916: 31) himself in order to differentiate it
from langue, which can be made up of various codes (spoken and written). For
instance, if a verbal text is written in Swahili, the speaker-hearer must know the
Swahili language and its grammar (langue) in order to extract any meaning from
it (the code). So, calling emojis a code is correct, since they inform us how a text
is to be deciphered. The paradox, therefore, is that emojis may constitute both a
langue and an interpretive code. This could be the underlying cause of why
emojis, which were intended to enhance broader comprehension of written
texts, irrespective of language and its orthographic features, have displayed
such a high degree of variability. They were designed artificially as a universal
langue, but they have ended up being interpretive codes that vary according to
users of specific languages. For example, the smiley figure was meant to be as

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252  Marcel Danesi

culturally neutral as possible, designed as a simple facial circle colored in

yellow as an obvious attempt to remove recognizable facial features associated
with race or ethnicity. However, almost right after its spread into universal
usage, the code behind it became subject to culturally shaped meanings,
leading to new designs. The result has been an attenuation of the desired
universality of the code and, consequently, of the universality of the episodic
langue it subserves.

4 Emojis as parole
Evidence that emojis are now an intrinsic part of parole in digital media, that is,
of everyday communicative practices through the Internet, is now rather
abundant (for example, Miller et al. 2016; Moschini 2016; Vidal, Ares, and Jaeger
2016; Alshenqeeti 2016). Two relevant aspects involve the use of emojis for
phatic and emotive communicative functions. The former was defined by British
anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1923) as formulaic utterances that are
important less for their meanings than for their social functions. Greetings, for
example, do not carry a semantic load in the normal sense; they are used to
make contact or show group adherence. Emotivity is the use of words and
phrases to convey tone, point of view, emotional state, etc. (Jakobson 1960). In
terms of the phatic function, a smiley used at the beginning of a text message
constitutes an opening social protocol such as “Hello,” “Dear so-and-so,” and
the like. But it simultaneously encompasses an emotive function, since it
provides an opening interpretive frame for imbuing the tone of the message
with positivity, thus ensuring that a bond between interlocutors is established.
An analysis of text messages shows that three phatic functions are now part
of systematic emoji usage (Danesi 2016):

1. Utterance opener. An opening smiley, or some other emoji, conveys a

salutation, allowing the sender to strengthen or establish a friendly bond
with the interlocutor even when a message may have some negativity in
its contents.
2. Utterance ending. The smiley and similar sentiment emoji (such as hearts)
constitute a typical good-bye function in a message.
3. Support. Putting emojis in some locations allows the sender to support the
content visually and thus effectively.

Emotivity reveals one’s state of mind or emotional state. In face-to-face

communication, people use interjections, intonation, and other prosodic
devices, alongside specific keywords and phrases, to convey their feelings,

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 Emojis: Langue or Parole?  253

explicitly or implicitly. In most informal digital messages, these are typically

supplemented or even replaced by emoji forms.
In addition to such communicative functions, research has shown that
emojis vary along social and psychological scales and are thus open to
interpretive variability and even misinterpretation – both central aspects of
parole. This is remarkable, given that the original emoji lexicon was designed to
be free of such fluctuation and variability (Barbieri et al. 2016; Chen et al. 2018).
For example, Chen et al. (2018) examined emoji usage in a large dataset of
smartphone users across the world. They found that emoji selection and
frequency was gender-coded, to the point that a machine learning algorithm
was easily constructed that accurately inferred the gender of the user based on
the emoji features they discovered. Studies are now also showing that
misinterpretation emerges in various domains of the emoji lexicon. A well-
known example is the nail polish emoji, which has been found to trigger a
whole array of unwanted connotations that users in some non-English speaking
countries want to avoid, finding the emoji offensive:

Figure 7: Nail polish emoji

The thumbs-up emoji is another problematic one.

Figure 8: The thumbs-up emoji

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This gesture is offensive in parts of the Middle East, Africa, Russia, and South
America. In some of these areas, it is the equivalent of using the middle finger in
the Western world. The list of such culturally offensive emoji is an extensive one,
and need not concern us here. The point is that ambiguity, misinterpretations,
and cultural-coding have emerged unexpectedly in emoji usage. In effect, one
cannot assume an isomorphic relation between an emoji and its interpretation.
Glikson, Chesin, and van Kleef (2018) even found that smileys do not increase
perceptions of warmth (as they were designed to do) and in the workplace they
may actually decrease perceptions of competence.
Humorous and ironic emoji are also problematic, given the cultural
variation that characterizes these strategies. In fact, it seems that the humor or
irony is processed according to the language and culture of the users. Benjamin
Weissman and Dean Tanner (2018) studied brain wave patterns of people
reading texts with emojis in them finding that emojis are processed in the same
ways that we process ironic language. This is a remarkable finding indeed, since
it suggests that emojis are discourse markers that overlap with langue and
parole, constituting devices that are powerful emotively.
As the foregoing discussion implies, the Saussurean dichotomy of langue
and parole and his belief that the two were separate systems – which Chomsky
(1957) later labeled competence and performance – is not sustainable, at least in
the domain of emojis. The emoji “test case” thus indirectly confirms the view of
linguists, such as M. A. K. Halliday (1975) and Dell Hymes (1971), that the two
dimensions are interactive, not autonomous. Hymes argued that speech (parole)
is as regulated by meaning-based structures as linguistic competence is by rules
of grammar. He put forth the notion of “communicative competence,” defining
it as the specific use of a language for purposes of communication and the
system of implicit rules of usage and locutionary adaptation that it entails.
Moreover, Hymes claimed that parole actually altered langue, which changes
gradually as we use it.
Today, it has become apparent that langue subserves broader cognitive
processes. George Lakoff (1987) has argued that the foundations of langue are
figurative, not syntactic in the Chomskyan sense. He proposed that grammar
and communication (linguistic and communicative competence) were
intertwined with figurative semantics. To show how even a simple grammatical
category had a basis in figurative cognition, Lakoff (1987) gave the example of
the Australian language Dyirbal, which, like many other languages, had
grammatical gender. Each of its nouns is assigned to one of the available
genders. In European languages, the gender is frequently unpredictable from its
literal meaning. For example, the word for “table” is masculine in German (der
Tisch), feminine in French (la table), and neuter in Greek (to trapézi). Dyirbal

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has four genders, which are based on the meaning of nouns. One of these
includes all nouns pertaining to women, to fire, and to dangerous things (snakes,
stinging nettles, and the like). These reflect a perception of the world that is
based on metaphorical thinking. In a fundamental way, each emoji is a figure of
mind – a type of cognitive metaphor – that should and can be studied under the
rubric of “Lakoffian grammar” – an area that certainly needs further
investigation.

5 Concluding remarks
The conclusion that can be put forth tentatively here is that emojis constitute a
self-contained semiotic system, involving both langue and parole in an
integrated fashion, with one dimension affecting the other. This implies that the
original Saussurean dichotomy is clearly not sustainable in this domain. Also, if
emojis do indeed constitute a langue, it is one that is based on episodic
grammar, rather than on any model of linguistic grammar. It is not syntax or
morphology that guide the distribution of the emojis in a text, but narrative
structure. In this way, they might indeed approach a quasi-universal code of
communication, given the high degree of iconicity that visuality entails, which
translates homogeneously across languages more so than verbality does.
Nevertheless, the research has been showing that even in this domain
interpretive variability emerges. Peirce (1931) referred to this type of iconicity as
“hypoiconicity.” Unlike Saussure, Peirce viewed semiosis as originating in the
perception of some property in an object. Since iconic signs are fashioned in
specific contexts, their interpretations are not universal, even though they
spring from the same human perceptual (abductive) apparatus. Peirce used the
term hypoicon to acknowledge this context-constraining dimension of what he
called Firstness. Nevertheless, because it is a sensory-based sign, the emoji
referent can often be figured out even by those who are not part of the
contextual situation if they are told how it simulates, resembles, or substitutes it.
The emoji movement was sparked by the belief that words set people apart
and may bring about misunderstanding and conflict. For this reason, people
have often dreamed of creating an artificial, universal langue, which everyone
could speak and understand unambiguously. The reason given for such a
language is a simple one – if all people spoke the same tongue, cultural and
economic ties might be much closer, and good will would increase between
countries. René Descartes is believed to have originated the idea of a universal
language in the 1600s. More than 200 such languages have been invented since

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256  Marcel Danesi

he made his proposal. Today, only Esperanto is used somewhat. Esperanto has
a simple, uniform morphological structure – adjectives end in a, adverbs end in
e, nouns end in o, an n is added at the end of a noun used as an object; and
plurals end in j. The basic core vocabulary of Esperanto consists mainly of root
morphemes common to the Indo-European languages. Clearly, this hardly
makes it a universal langue.
The appearance and spread of emojis may have taken over from the
Esperanto movement. If the movement is sustainable, then the way we read and
write messages is not only radically different from the past, but it may also
indicate a shift away from a linear mode of processing information, as imprinted
in alphabetic-phonetic layouts, toward a more holistic and imaginative mode.
However, since emojis depend on specific technologies, it remains to be seen if
they transcend these and become a permanent part of the evolution of language
and communication.

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Bionote
Marcel Danesi
Marcel Danesi (b. 1946) is Full Professor of Linguistic Anthropology and Semiotics at the Uni-
versity of Toronto. His research interests span areas from semiotic theory and pop culture
analysis to metaphorical analysis and mathematical representation. Recent publications in-
clude: Marshall McLuhan: The unwitting semiotician (2018), Ahmes’ legacy: Puzzles and the
mathematical mind (2018), An anthropology of puzzles: The role of puzzles in the origins and
evolution of mind and culture (2018), and Memes and the future of pop culture (2019).

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