Let me be clear: I don't particularly like emoji. I don't even like texting, which apparently is odd for anyone my age or younger. However, I do sometimes text with my wife (although it's more like IM to me since I use the Google Hangouts plugin on my desktop).

I've gotten over the stupidity of emoji but I still have one major problem with them, and one that's never addressed whenever I see an article touting emoji as the next "universal language" or whatever nonsense: they're not all the same!

Yes, if you're an iPhone user texting another iPhone user, you're going to see the same things. Android to Android will be the same thing too. But iPhone to Android is NOT the same. This bothers me immensely. If these things are supposed to be a universal language, then the system is broken because plenty can get lost in "translation." If I'm going to use one of these little pictures to convey a meaning, then very subtle variations can greatly alter that meaning.

So that leads me to ask: who is using the "right" emojis? Is there even such a thing as the "right" emojis? I frequently hear about Apple pushing out new symbols in their updates, but is that just them making up new images and declaring them "the standard?" Believe me, I'm not being platform biased here. If the ones that Google are using are the wrong ones (again, if such a thing can be the case), then I want them to stop using them. It just baffles me that people could try to communicate using similar but different languages. I've stopped using these silly things altogether because I have no idea what's showing up on the other end!

So, who is right? Is anyone?

I consider emoji to be an entertainment/game product.

Anyone trying to use it as an actual language is ignoring the risks that you just laid out.

Sorry no answer but I second not particularly liking texting. I had a "Two Way Pager" for work in like 2000 and it got old for me by the time everyone started texting.

Amazingly enough, the Unicode people are all over this. See, for example, the Emojipedia article on Unicode 8.0 code-points. See, for example, the party-popper or everybody's favorite pile-of-poo. I personally hate emoji, and every time my mobile phone keyboard dumps into emoji mode, I want to shoot somebody, but... I also have a ten-year-old daughter, and she loves the stuff as do all her friends.

We're doomed.

Everyone is basically using the same emoji. Unicode defines the standard, giving a textual description for each one.

Apple, Google, Microsoft et al come up with their own images to represent each emoji in the standard. So the actual images vary.

The timid also varies, some of the emoji that Apple have added recently won't work on other platforms until those platforms update to implement the latest characters. It isn't always Apple who are ahead.

The vast majority of the characters will just work everywhere, but look a bit different everywhere.

The history of emoji ties back to the Japanese cellular market in the pre smartphone era. Texting using the Japanese language on a T9 keypad wasn't a great experience. Emoji emerged from one of their phone companies as a way of sending quicker text messages. The idea was to expand the range of ASCII emoticons/smilies widely that were showing up online. Each provider ended up creating their own emoji and they weren't compatible between networks initially. Eventually standards came into play, and I think around 2010 is when Unicode came in to the emoji picture.

The iPhone does have some ties to this becoming used worldwide. Initially Apple added emoji support to the iPhone when they were focused on the market in Japan. It was essentially an informal requirement there due to how popular emoji became on older phones. People outside Japan were finding ways to enable emoji and noticed it worked iPhone to iPhone at the time. Android adopted emoji as well, standards came into play, and it's now used around the world.

Here's the Unicode 8.0 document on "Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs", aka emoji.

Thanks, everyone. Yes, I understood the history and the way it works, and even that there was Unicode standards in place. What I still don't understand is how the "standard" got to the point of defining what the image should be, but basically not what it looks like. That's the only part that puzzles me.

Like I said, if emoji are supposed to be some form of communication, then I don't understand how you could communicate with someone if you were only speaking similar languages. You'll get the gist of the message, but any subtlety is lost.

Although, I guess I don't ascribe much capability for subtlety to emoji users. So I guess this is all moot.

What the difference between these?

aaa

Font/typeface licensing has allowed me to type "a" three times, with three different but similar looking symbols. Unicode doesn't own the rights to a font, instead, they are provided non prescriptive licenses to show the emoji typefaces as an example alongside the text descriptions. The fonts used in the Unicode document are licensed from these companies or people: http://www.unicode.org/charts/fonts.html

A connection that has helped me ponder emoji is seeing them really no different then other character systems I don't personally use daily, but millions around the world do. I was born in the US, raised with a latin character set and US English spelling.

Sorry, Tom, but I don't think the analogy works. If I see someone wrote "colour," and I'd never seen that spelling before, I'd probably know what they meant from the context, and if I thought it was an odd spelling I could research it. The difference is that the person who wrote it wrote "colour" and what I saw on my end was "colour." This is completely different than what I'm talking about.

Take a look at the attached image. Look at the third row of couplets and the fourth couplet in. In this case, I'd have to imagine that Google's interpretation is wrong. Based on the images around those seats, I assume the standard meant "airline seat," and perhaps the standard only said "seat." But if someone with an iPhone sent that emoji of an airline seat and the person on Android got a picture of what is basically a standard chair, then there's a loss of communication.

In the end, I realize that this is very pedantic, but even in the very little emoji usage that my wife and I have done, we've had times where we realize that each of us are seeing some different images. For most of them they're certainly close enough, but it still bothers me that we're reading different things and perhaps not communicating the way we intend. It's certainly made me give up on using emojis and sticking to plain text.

What about the two other examples of color I used? The connection I'm trying to draw here is that emoji is another language, one that is written only. When we speak it, everyone on the planet is translating a written language into their spoken language of choice. The "dictionary" of emoji is what the Unicode group produces. They don't produce a universal typeface for them, which could help early adoption if they did. Though going back to my other font example, we seem to get by with plenty of variances on the symbol/character A.


Looks like that's U+1F4BA which is officially defined as this:
"SEAT - intended to denote a reserved or ticketed seat, as for an airplane, train, or theater"

Definitely see where the icons chosen between Apple and Google here would lead to confusion. Both also stray pretty far from the Unicode example. Until I looked it up, I hadn't ever made the connection to that representing a ticketed seat.

In addition to the problem of a lack of pictographic standardization, there is also the issue of a lack of dictionary definition standardization for each symbol. It's one thing to describe what a pictogram is a picture of, and another thing to interpret a verb/noun/adjective/etc definition of the pictogram.

On the other hand, I would expect all written languages to have an infancy where the details of all of that get hashed out. For instance, there is http://emojidictionary.emojifoundation.com/ which is trying to solve the latter problem.

Emoji still looks to me like a toy rather than an actual language. It lacks many of the traits that a real communicative language requires (verb tenses, articles, etc.) Maybe someday it will evolve and grow into that.

That you're still asking about that shows that you still don't understand my side of this. Tom, the analogy doesn't work.

When someone writes a word in their language and sends it to another person, they have a reasonable expectation that what the other person is receiving looks like what they sent. Whether or not the person who received it is able to read that language is up to the recipient, but at least there's the understanding by both parties that they're working with the same visual.

What I'm talking about is the fact that the translation happens in the middle. You send me "airline seat" and I see "chair." There's no longer the expectation that you're at least seeing the same thing I sent you.

When I write "la bebida," you might not know Spanish, but at least I know you saw those letters in that order. You didn't see "líquido" because something in the middle changed the meaning slightly.

Yes, there are many typefaces that can be used for the letter A. The difference is that it looks the same to me as it does to you.

This is why you don't see much cuneiform used these days.

"Bird, bird, triangle, eye, snake, bird."

Hmmmm.