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Media and Communication (ISSN: 2183–2439)
2017, Volume 5, Issue 4, Pages 75–78
DOI: 10.17645/mac.v5i4.1041
Book Review
The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the
Internet
Laura Kerslake and Rupert Wegerif *
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 8PQ, UK; E-Mails: laurakerslake@gmail.com (L.K.),
rw583@cam.ac.uk (R.W.)
* Corresponding author
Submitted: 14 May 2017 | Accepted: 7 June 2017 | Published: 21 December 2017
Abstract
This paper reviews Marcel Danesi’s new book on the use of emoji in particular, and the use of visual language more gen-
erally. Danesi offers a number of interesting examples of emoji use, pointing out that their use has risen considerably in a
number of contexts. He goes on to question how far emoji use can be extended by examining the structure of the emoji
‘language’. Overall this is an accessible book that presents a number of examples of visual languages and comments on
the possibilities and challenges for visual language use against a backdrop of technological change.
Keywords
emoji; visual communication; semiotics; visual languages
Issue
This book review is part of the issue “Visual Communication in the Age of Social Media: Conceptual, Theoretical and
Methodological Challenges”, edited by Uta Russmann (FHWien der WKW University of Applied Sciences for Management
& Communication, Austria) and Jakob Svensson (Malmö University, Sweden).
© 2017 by the authors; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu-
tion 4.0 International License (CC BY).
1. Background
As this book points out in its opening sentence, the
‘face with tears of joy’ emoji became the Oxford En-
glish Dictionary (OED) Word of the Year in 2015. The
Word of the Year is chosen as the best reflection of
that year in a single word—other contenders included
refugee and Brexit (OED, 2016). The OED justification
for its choice reveals a great deal about the use of
emoji in current digital communication; the OED web-
site states that it made the decision to give the Word
of the Year distinction to an emoji because use of emoji
not only increased considerably in 2015—with the ‘face
with tears of joy’ emoji accounting for a fifth of all emoji
used—but was also used broadly across social groups.
This trend saw emoji used increasingly by advertisers
and politicians.
The term emoji refers specifically to the characters
systematised by Unicode, which has allowed emoji to be
standardised across operating systems (p. 4). The term
emoji actually means e(picture) moji (letter/character)
(p. 2), but its similarity to the English word emotion is
of particular note because that is, in fact, how most peo-
ple use emoji. The designer of emoji, Shigetaka Kurita,
highlights this point, stating that it is the rise of digital
communication, a medium which doesn’t readily allow
for expressions of emotion, which made the use of emoji
necessary to compensate for the inability to convey facial
expression, tone of voice and gesture in digital commu-
nication (Lucas, 2016).
2. This Book’s Place
The OED website also adds that emoji can ‘cross language
barriers’ (OED, 2016), which is a central theme of this
book. Whether or not emoji can be considered a univer-
sal language is an issue which is raised in each of the
chapters in the book as Marcel Danesi considers both so-
Media and Communication, 2017, Volume 5, Issue 4, Pages 75–78 75
cial and communicative elements of emoji use, as well as
linguistic considerations.
There is a theoretical aspect to each chapter which
is mostly light in order to maintain accessibility to the
general audience to which this book aims to appeal. De-
spite this there are a number of technical linguistic terms
used, for example ‘phatic’ which refers to a communica-
tion which contains emotive content (p. 18). These are
used sparingly, however, and with full explanation, and
so in its mix of general and specialised language, the book
does manage to command more general appeal whilst
situating its explanations within an established linguis-
tic context.
While the focus of the book is emoji, the sub-title
The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the Internet in-
dicates the breadth of its scholarship. It is an extended
essay on visual languages with many interesting diver-
sions exploring a wide range of relevant topics such as
the possible role of gesture in the evolution of language,
Medieval illuminated manuscripts, rebus writing, Leib-
niz’s attempt to develop a universal visual language and
even Teilhard de Chardin’s account of an emerging global
consciousness written, of course, well before the Inter-
net Age. This historical perspective enables Danesi to ad-
vance the interesting hypothesis that emoji may be a re-
trieval of hybridity in writing, that is to say the combina-
tion of picture writing with phonetic writing, where this
hybridity goes back to the origins of writing and has been
a recurrent theme in the history of writing. He also sug-
gests, in an interesting excursion on Derrida, that emoji
writing might be seen as an ‘anti-hegemonic’ reaction to
the power relations of print literacy.
Research methods are not explicitly set out in the
book, although its origin was based on a database of
emoji communications compiled by four research stu-
dents at the University of Toronto. Instead, examples of
the communications are used throughout the book, to-
gether with questions and participant responses. There
is occasion when it would have been useful to know more
about the research context. For example, one of the
questions related is ‘Does emoji writing make you feel
more comfortable when communicating, reducing the
stress of face-to-face interaction?’ (p. 177). We are then
told that everyone answered in the affirmative, yet that
is hardly surprising given that it appears to be a leading
question, making an assumption that face-to-face com-
munication is stressful.
The book is, for the most part, well produced and
easy to use with a full index. If there is a practical criticism
of this book, it is that the examples of texts and digital
communications containing emoji are in small print on a
coloured background, making them very difficult to see.
It is therefore necessary to refer to accompanying text
and back to the emoji frequently in order to work out
what is being referred to, which is somewhat frustrating.
There are, however, numerous examples provided to il-
lustrate the author’s points, offering an interesting array
of the uses of emoji.
3. Emoji as Universal Language
The question of whether emoji are a complement to
the written word or a substitute is an important one
for what has been described as the world’s fastest grow-
ing language (Cioletti, 2016). Chapter Three—‘Emoji
Competence’—considers this issue, telling us that there
are two types of emoji text, adjunctive, where emoji are
used alongside text, and substitutive, where emoji are
used wholly in place of text.
The two examples given by the author in fact serve
as illustrations as to why emoji use—with or without ac-
companying words—does not (yet) seem sufficient to
produce texts that are equivalent in terms of meaning
to the written word alone. The first (p. 36) is an entire,
substitutive, emoji text entitled ‘My birth story’. The au-
thor points out that it is generally intelligible, but then
goes on to misinterpret it, stating that it tells of the
writer’s feelings ‘when she was born’ (p. 38). This isn’t
the case—the phrase ‘My birth story’ is understood to
refer to a woman’s story of when she gave birth. The web-
site BabyCentre has a thread asking its group members
to post their birth stories in emoji. A look at this high-
lights the issue of experience in emoji competence. Once
one has read a number of these emoji birth stories, then
they become easier to decode (time waiting, drugs taken
etc). If one has had the experience of giving birth, then
the emoji which represent these events are much easier
to decode. It doesn’t seem likely that, with any degree
of emoji competence, this would be decodable without
knowledge of the experience. This is a challenge to the
notion of emoji as a language (let alone a universal one),
as the traditional written word is capable of clearly ex-
pressing experiences which one has not had.
The same issue is also highlighted in the second ex-
ample given by Danesi in this chapter. This example is
an adjunctive one, the first sentence of this reads ‘This
is a [book emoji] all about how my life got [arrow of
circles emoji] [up arrow emoji] [down arrow emoji]’ (p.
38). Danesi again highlights that this can be easily under-
stood and translated as ‘this is a story about how my life
got turned around, up and down’ (p. 39). But, as is clear
from the rest of the example given, it is in fact a partial
emoji representation of the theme song to the television
show The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. The first line of the song
is ‘Now this is a story all about how/my life got flipped
turned upside down’ (Smith and Townes, as cited on the
LyricsFreak website). It has a very specific meaning that
is not translatable as anything else.
There is, then, an extent to which emoji competence
is synonymous with cultural competence, and as such,
this does not provide a compelling indication that any de-
gree of emoji competence is sufficient to decode emoji
text. Instead it highlights the point that, as there are no
native emoji speakers, instead the ways in which emoji
are used are currently grounded in first languages. ‘No
special training is needed to learn emoji use’ (p. 158).
The examples given here, and the existence of the Emoji-
Media and Communication, 2017, Volume 5, Issue 4, Pages 75–78 76
pedia, which provides a reference guide to the meanings
of emoji indicate that training is needed to learn emoji
use. Despite this, Danesi is correct that people use emoji
in large numbers on a day-to-day basis without the need
for any formal instruction.
4. The Possibilities of Universal Languages
One of the interesting aspects of this book is the array
of other picture-writing systems referenced, for exam-
ple Pitman Shorthand, of which many people will have
heard, and Blissymbolics, which remains more obscure.
The latter was invented in the mid twentieth century by
Charles Bliss, and is interesting because it is capable of
conveying whole sentences.
The example of Blissymbolics perhaps provides a hint
as to why a universal writing system is an ideal which
can never be realised. While it provides a more compre-
hensive communication system than emoji, Bliss himself
was determined that his symbols had a specific mean-
ing, and was vitriolic when institutions interpreted them
in other ways. More recently, The Fundamental Rules
of Blissymbolics document states that ‘Creation of ter-
minology must be carried out according to the funda-
mental rules of Blissymbolics to ensure the integrity of
the system’ (Blissymbolics Communication International,
2004, p. 2).
Emoji, while standardised by Unicode, does not fol-
low this pattern. Anyone can propose new emoji to be-
come part of the canon and even where icons are re-
jected, existing emoji take on new meanings to fill this
gap. An example of this is the aubergine emoji, which is
commonly understood as a phallic symbol. A quick on-
line search reveals a plethora of articles from popular
media indicating to readers popular versus official mean-
ings of emoji. (e.g. Good Housekeeping Guide, 2016).
This raises interesting questions about Danesi’s claim
that ‘human communication in written form is evolving
more and more on a single path of hybridization’ (p.
88). Emoji as language is both a global practice which
highlights the role of human technology in transcend-
ing national boundaries, and at the same time a cultur-
ally situated practice in flux; emoji use therefore calls
attention to universal and particular instances of lan-
guage. The hybridization of visual languages with writ-
ten ones augments human possibilities for universal lan-
guage development.
5. Conclusion
Ultimately, as is reiterated throughout this book, emoji
are primarily used to add emotion to digital communi-
cations. They tend to add a positive tone to messages,
seen by their users as ‘fun’ (p. 179). This is an important
compensation for the relative lack of contextual clues in
online communication of the kind that are so important
to guiding interpretation in face to face communication.
Emoji used online can play a similar role to facial expres-
sion and gesture and are often to undermine seriousness
with a sense of shared humanity. Danesi ends by stating
that his conclusion is that he has no conclusion. He rightly
points out that the adaptability of human communica-
tion is likely to prevail, and the continued use of emoji
will depend considerably on the form that new techno-
logical development takes as much as any inherent value
in emoji communication itself.
Conflict of Interests
The authors declare no conflict of interests.
References
Blissymbolics Communication International. (2004).
The fundamental rules of Blissymbolics. Retrieved
from http://www.blissymbolics.org/images/bliss-
rules.pdf
Danesi, M. (2016). The semiotics of emoji: The rise of
visual language in the age of the Internet. London:
Bloomsbury Publishing.
Cioletti, A. (2016). A universal language. License! Global,
19(3), 194–197.
Lucas, G. (2016). The story of emoji. Creative Review,
36(5), 74–81.
Oxford English Dictionary. (2016, November 16).
Oxford dictionaries word of the year 2015 is….
Retrieved from http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/
2015/11/word-of-the-year-2015-emoji
About the Authors
Laura Kerslake is conducting research into Philosophy with Children at the University of Cambridge.
Her work looks at how philosophy with young children is augmented by the introduction of a pictorial-
based talking framework to help to create a dialogic space in the classroom. Laura is editing a forth-
coming book on the theory of teaching thinking, as well as having articles published in peer-reviewed
journals. She is the creator of the Philosophize project and also lectures on philosophy courses at the
University of Exeter. She is completing her PhD under the supervision of Rupert Wegerif.
Media and Communication, 2017, Volume 5, Issue 4, Pages 75–78 77
Rupert Wegerif is Professor of Education (2000) at the University of Cambridge. He did his PhD on
Educational Technology at the Open University and his research focuses on dialogic education with
technology in the context of the Internet Age. This includes a particular interest in the cognitive impact
of new communications media (see 2013, Dialogic: Education for the Internet Age). He has gained over
£2 million in research funding as principal investigator and published 9 books, as well as many highly
cited peer-reviewed papers. He is founding lead editor of the Elsevier SSCI journal Thinking Skills and
Creativity and is founder and co-convenor of the Educational Theory SIG of EARLI.
Media and Communication, 2017, Volume 5, Issue 4, Pages 75–78 78
