24. 05. 2023. 22:06 Will emoji become a new language?

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IN DEPTH | L ANGUAGE

Will emoji become a new language?

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

By Neil Cohn 13th October 2015

Emoji are already butting their heads with traditional words, but could they take over
completely? Linguist Neil Cohn casts his expert eye over the pictures taking the world by
storm.

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he year 2015 could be called the year of the emoji. They have landed a teenage boy in a
police cell and prompted Vladimir Putin’s wrath in Russia, and the loveable smiley faces are
even set to come to life in their own Hollywood film. Emoji are now used in around half of

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every sentence on sites like Instagram, and Facebook looks set to introduce

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them alongside the famous “like” button as a way of expression your reaction
to a post.

To many, emoji are an exciting evolution of the way we

communicate; to others, they are linguistic Armageddon.
If you were to believe the headlines, this is just the tipping point: some outlets have claimed
that emoji are an emerging language that could soon compete with English in global usage.
To many, this would be an exciting evolution of the way we communicate; to others, it is
linguistic Armageddon.

As a linguist concerned with visual communication, I have been interested to explore

exactly what lies in these claims. Do emoji show the same characteristics of other
communicative systems and actual languages? And what do they help us to express that
words alone can’t say?

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When emoji appear with text, they often supplement or enhance the writing. This is similar
to gestures that appear along with speech. Over the past three decades, research has shown
that our hands provide important information that often transcends and clarifies the
message in speech. Emoji serve this function too – for instance, adding a kissy or winking
face can disambiguate whether a statement is flirtatiously teasing or just plain mean.

Hand gestures add nuance to the spoken word - embellishments that the written language has
traditionally lacked (Credit: Getty Images)

This is a key point about language use: rarely is natural language ever limited to speech
alone. When we are speaking, we constantly use gestures to illustrate what we mean. For

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this reason, linguists say that language is “multi-modal”. Writing takes away that extra non-
verbal information, but emoji may allow us to re-incorporate it into our text.

Emoji are not always used as embellishments, however – sometimes, strings of the
characters can themselves convey meaning in a longer sequence on their own. But to
constitute their own language, they would need a key component: grammar.

A grammatical system is a set of constraints that governs how the meaning of an utterance
is packaged in a coherent way. Natural language grammars have certain traits that
distinguish them. For one, they have individual units that play different roles in the
sequence – like nouns and verbs in a sentence. Also, grammar is different from meaning,
which is why an active sentence like Hobbes tackled Calvin conveys roughly the same
meaning as the passive Calvin was tackled by Hobbes, though they differ in the sequencing of
their grammatical structure.

In addition, grammars are made up of groupings of units. The sentence Calvin, who is a short
blonde boy, was tackled by Hobbes has several groupings, most noticeably the clause (Calvin)
is a short blonde boy which is embedded inside the sentence Calvin was tackled by Hobbes.

When emoji are isolated, they are primarily governed by simple rules related to meaning
alone, without these more complex rules. For instance, according to research by Tyler
Schnoebelen, people often create strings of emoji that share a common meaning, like this
texted birthday greeting:

These emoji could be arranged in any order and still convey the same meaning (Credit: Neil
Cohn/Adam Proctor)

This sequence has little internal structure; even when it is rearranged, it still conveys the
same message. These images are connected solely by their broader meaning. We might
consider them to be a visual list: “here are all things related to celebrations and birthdays.”
Lists are certainly a conventionalised way of communicating, but they don’t have grammar
the way that sentences do.

What if the order did matter though? What if they conveyed a temporal sequence of events?
Consider this example, which means something like “a woman had a party where they drank,
and then opened presents and then had cake”:

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In certain circumstances, emoji follow sequences that represent the order of events (Credit: Neil
Cohn/Adam Proctor)

In this case, the units are connected only by linear order. One unit “happens” after the next.
Rearranging this sequence would create a new order, or perhaps would just revert to loose
meaningful connections, like the ones about birthdays above.

Another technique appears when people are talking about objects doing things.
Schnoebelen gives these examples:

In these examples, the "agent" on the left precedes the action on the right - a pattern also seen in
written languages (Credit: Neil Cohn/Adam Proctor)

In all cases, the doer of the action (the agent) precedes the action. In fact, this pattern is
commonly found in both full languages and simple communication systems. For example,
the majority of the world’s languages place the subject before the verb of a sentence.

These rules may seem like the seeds of grammar, but psycholinguist Susan Goldin-Meadow
and colleagues have found this order appears in many other systems that would not be
considered a language. For example, this order appears when people arrange pictures to
describe events from an animated cartoon, or when speaking adults communicate using
only gestures. It also appears in the gesture systems created by deaf children who cannot
hear spoken languages and are not exposed to sign languages. In Goldin-Meadow’s book
The Resilience of Language, she describes the children as lacking exposure to a language
and thus invent their own manual systems to communicate, called “homesigns”. These
systems are limited in the size of their vocabularies and the types of sequences they can
create. For this reason, the agent-act order seems not to be due to a grammar, but from
basic heuristics – practical workarounds – based on meaning alone. Emoji seem to tap into
this same system.

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Nevertheless, some may argue that despite emoji’s current simplicity, this may be the
groundwork for emerging complexity – that although emoji do not constitute a language at
the present time, they could develop into one over time.

In the 1970s, deaf homesigners in Nicaragua were brought

together in a school for the first time. The result was a new
Nicaraguan sign language, which is still developing
Some precedent for this exists in sign languages too. In the 1970s, deaf homesigners in
Nicaragua were brought together in a school for the first time. In sharing their own
individual systems with each other, a more complex system began to emerge, which grew to
the richness of a full language as new cohorts entered the school. The result was a new
Nicaraguan sign language, which is still developing.

The birth of a new tongue?

Could an emerging “emoji visual language” be developing in a similar way, with actual
grammatical structure? To answer that question, you need to consider the intrinsic
constraints on the technology itself.

Emoji are created by typing into a computer like text. But, unlike text, most emoji are
provided as whole units, except for the limited set of emoticons which convert to emoji, like
:) or ;). When writing text, we use the building blocks (letters) to create the units (words), not
by searching through a list of every whole word in the language. Drawings are similar,
combining simple building blocks (lines and shapes) to make larger units (representational
drawings).

The enormous eloquence of visual languages can be seen in the vast libraries of comic books and
graphic novels (Credit: Getty Images)

Emoji do not allow this building of units from parts, however. For example, let’s say I want to
talk about my brother surfing. I could assign a mustachioed emoji to represent my brother
(itself a challenge because of the limited emoji vocabulary) and then combine it with the one
for surfing to make the sequence.

This follows the agent-action pattern described above. It lacks the flexibility that I might
have with drawing though - if I wanted to naturally convey this message with pen and paper,
I’d just draw my brother surfing, with his head on the surfing body, with no awkward and
artificial sequencing.

In this way, emoji force us to convey information in a linear unit-unit string, which limits how
complex expressions can be made. These constraints may mean that they will never be able
to achieve even the most basic complexity that we can create with normal and natural
drawings.

What’s more, these limits also prevent users from creating novel signs – a requisite for all
languages, especially emerging ones. Users have no control over the development of the
vocabulary. As the “vocab list” for emoji grows, it will become increasingly unwieldy: using

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them will require a conscious search process through an external list, not an easy
generation from our own mental vocabulary, like the way we naturally speak or draw. This is
a key point – it means that emoji lack the flexibility needed to create a new language.

Do you talk comic book?

The irony is that the focus on emoji has meant that many have neglected that we already
have very robust visual languages, as can be seen in comics and graphic novels. As I argue in
my book, The Visual Language of Comics, the drawings found in comics use a systematic
visual vocabulary (such as stink lines to represent smell, or stars to represent dizziness).
Importantly, the available vocabulary is not constrained by technology and has developed
naturally over time, like spoken and written languages.

Unlike emoji, the visual language used in comics creates

“grammatical” sequences of images, making them more
similar to spoken or sign languages
What’s more, unlike emoji, the visual language used in comics creates “grammatical”
sequences of images in a way that makes them much more similar to spoken or sign
languages. In this case, the grammar of sequential images is more of a narrative structure –
not of nouns and verbs. Yet, these sequences use principles of combination like any other
grammar, including roles played by images, groupings of images, and hierarchic embedding.

Take this sequence adapted from the comic One Night by Tym Godek where a man lying in
bed considers getting up and taking a shower, only to decide against it. Not only is the
ordering crucial to convey the meaning; you can also see a smaller sequence embedded
within a larger structure. That’s very similar to the clause in a sentence such as Calvin, who is
a short blonde boy, was tackled by Hobbes.

Comic strips folow the rules of grammar. For instance, the thought bubbles act as a clause in a
wider sequence (Credit: Tym Godek)

All this requires some form of grouping and hierarchy – traits important to grammars in
natural languages. Perhaps the most convincing evidence that this constitutes a “grammar”
in this “visual language” comes from our studies of the brain. In an experiment published
last year in the journal Neuropsychologia, we measured participants’ brainwaves while they
viewed sequences one image at a time where a disruption appeared either within the
groupings of panels or at the natural break between groupings. The particular brainwave
responses that we observed were similar to those that experimenters find when violating
the syntax of sentences. That is, the brain responds the same way to violations of
“grammar”, whether in sentences or sequential narrative images.

I would hypothesise that emoji can use a basic narrative structure to organise short stories
(likely made up of agent-action sequences), but I highly doubt that they would be able to
create embedded clauses like these. I would also doubt that you would see the same kinds
of brain responses that we saw with the comic strip sequences.

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Despite this, I believe that emoji are still very useful for enhancing and enriching the text of
our contemporary digital conversations and interactions, injecting a note of humour,
affection or even melancholy into the most concise message. Their increasing popularity
serves as a reminder that there is a lot more to our communication than words alone.
However, they pale in comparison to the richness or complexity of both natural written
languages and the visual languages that already exist in the drawings we have used for
millennia.

Neil Cohn is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of California, San Diego. You can
find his work at the Visual Language Lab.

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IN DEPTH | PSYCHOLOGY

The life-changing effects of hallucinations

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(Image credit: Emmanuel Lafont/BBC)

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By William Park  6th October 2022

Illusions brought on by drugs, lights and disease are giving us new insights into the inner
workings of our brains. William Park ventured into his own induced hallucination to find out
more.

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he Huichol tribe from the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains in Mexico can

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speak to spirits. They leave our Earthly plane to visit animals and ancestors
with the assistance of a small, green cactus.

The cactus, called peyote, is cut into discs and chewed raw to release a
hallucinogen. A peyote trip starts with a "growing sense of euphoria", followed by a
heightened sense of the noises around, before the tipper is plunged into a world of vivid
dreams – at least that is how anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff described her experience
after taking peyote with members of a Huichol tribe in western Mexico in her book Peyote
Hunt.

Peyote contains mescaline – a psychedelic compound that can produce hallucinations

similar to the effects of taking magic mushrooms. The discs taste "unspeakably bitter-sour"
and "revolting" explains Myerhoff, but she adds that she lost her awareness of time, and
instead started to skip from one vivid, self-contained dream to another. "Although I
discovered that I couldn't move, I was able to remain calm when it occurred to me that this
was of no consequence because there was no other place that I wanted to be," she writes,
noting that she found the experience not in the least scary, but deeply moving.

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Psychedelics have been used in religious ceremonies, before war and for recreation in the
Americas for centuries. For example, ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic drink made from certain
brewed vines or shrubs, has been consumed by indigenous peoples in South America during
religious and healing rituals for perhaps as long as 1,000 years. The Olmecs – one of the
earliest Mesoamerican civilisations – and Maya people from Mexico are also thought to have
used the neurotoxin from cane toads to hallucinate in their rituals. They believed they could
speak to ancestors after taking a very small dose of dried toxin (too much would be fatal).

Why were these psychedelics used in rituals? Possibly because they elicit in the user a sense
of awe and wonder. Medium to high doses of similar hallucinogens generate lasting feelings
of bliss and insightfulness and a sense of profound spiritual enlightenment.

In the 1950s and 60s, there was a great deal of interest in psychedelics as a treatment for
disorders from depression and alcohol addiction to schizophrenia. The US even ran
experiments under the names Project MKUltra and Project MKDELTA to see if LSD could
be used as a truth drug. While research into the therapeutic benefits of hallucinogens was
largely paused after LSD was criminalised in the
Continue late 60s, there has recently been a renewal
reading
of interest in using hallucinogens such as ketamine and LSD as therapeutic treatments,
with a spate of new studies.
;

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