Angela Wang 
When we usually talk to people in person, we use our tone, facial expressions, and hand gestures to express our emotions and attitude. It adds meaning to the conversation and to what we say. But when we chat online, the clues of these gestures are missing. That’s when we start using emojis while we chat online. The simple symbols are often seen as a decoration for our messages, but it can become a new kind of visual language that people use.
Emojis sometimes work just like languages. They have some shared meanings that everyone agrees on. It has some rules that people follow to mean a certain way during a conversation. Spoken language has rules like this in a much more complex way.
There are many ways to use emojis in online conversations:
Vocabulary and Meaning:
A simple emoji sometimes is just its literal meaning. For example, a basketball 🏀 is just a basketball.
A heart 💗 could express emotions and meaning in a sentence.
Some emojis could mean represent slang. A skull 💀 could mean “I’m dying of laughter”. This is where people create meaning with emojis and everyone agrees that it has a specific meaning.
Placement in a sentence:
It could be put at the end of a sentence to express feeling or emotion. For example, “I’m so tired🥱”.
Emojis can also replace actual words in a sentence. “Let’s meet at the 📖” is where the book represents the library.
Can Emojis really become a language?
They can’t work as a language on its own. We can’t write novels and articles with only emojis. The grammar of it is too simple to express all feelings and isn’t enough to convey deeper meanings. Instead, emojis can only work alongside our languages and fill in what is missing in plain text. Emojis aren’t enough to function as a language on its own, but it can act as a system that can add extra meaning to a sentence.
Image credit:
diariopanorama.com
