THE LANGUAGE OF EMOJIS

ABSTRACT

On the assumption that language is a complex adaptive system, this article demonstrates that digital communication technologies have a strong impact on human interactions, especially when mediated by mobile technologies. As a consequence, they bring changes into language. One such phenomenon is the use of emojis, pictures generated by the Unicode system to represent emotions, and stickers used for the same purpose in some social networks such as Facebook. This paper presents the history of emojis; discusses their circulation in interactions with mobile technology; and identifies syntactic and discursive regularities in emojis and stickers in Twitter, WhatsApp and Facebook. In addition, the text demonstrates how this new language has been used by other media.

Keywords:
complexity; communication; emojis