🧐 #AMA on #emojis for #WorldEmojiDay ❗ #linguistics
@tschfflr I am often curious: which emojis are used the least often?
@tschfflr Can emojis be removed from Unicode? Or are they there forever once they are in?
There are now almost 4000 emojis supported in the international Unicode standard, as of last year, with a few to be added this year
You can look them all up here: https://emojipedia.org/ #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
It did all start with 😄 and 😒 and the start of these emoticons is widely credited to a bulletin board message by Scott Fahlmann in 1982 (where he suggested them as markers of joking or seriousness) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
@tschfflr I still miss the animated emoticons in GTalk aka Google Talk. Apart from yellowish bubble style and rectangle style emoticons, there were upright typeface style emoticons. You just typed e.g. 😈 and it tilted 90° to the left and its "horns" turned red.
https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/05/google-talk-gadget-with-emoticons.html?m=1
These traditional emoticons created from standard punctuation characters, letters and numbers have been largely crowded out by colorful #emojis in the last 15 years. Emojis started being supported by Japanese mobile communication platforms (phones) in the 80s/90s, but became widespread world-wide only when they were introduced into the international Unicode standard in 2010 - and subsequently supported by all kinds of technology providers and software.
So the 2010s is when "it all got out of control" @Kuchenschwarte 😅 #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
(Little aside: The Unicode list provides an international standard of symbol encodings which should be supported - including our Latin characters as well as characters and symbols for hundreds of other languages of the world. This ensures that if you write Hindi or Korean or Arabic or Finnish, another person will be able to decipher and potentially read your digital document. Since 2010, this list also includes emojis - so my "hugging-face" will show on your computer as your "hugging-face" 🤗 ) #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay #emojis