At the top there are always them: the face laughing out loud and the heart. The top ten emoji drawn up as every year by the Unicode Consortium, the international body that deals with orchestrating the standardization of characters and interoperability between devices from different manufacturers that use different systems, places them in the head – just like in the 2019, the last year in which a similar report was published – in front of another laughing face, the one with the crooked head, the thumb upwards, the smiley crying bitterly, the hands folded in prayer, thanksgiving or according to many to give high five, the one who throws a kiss with heart, the one surrounded by little hearts, with heart-shaped eyes and finally the smiling one with red cheeks. They are the same as two years ago, with only one difference: the double heart came out and the smiley face sprinkled with hearts entered.
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Are emojis really a new Esperanto that the world communicates with? Yes and no, in the sense that according to the organization if it is true that 92% of the world population uses them, it is equally true that their meaning it often changes profoundly according to the cultures, contexts and situations in which they are used. One thing, however, is certain: “Tears of Joy”, the face at the top, alone is worth the 5% of all exchanged emojis. Only the heart approaches such a threshold, all the others follow an enormous detachment. If a battle has always been fought around emojis for greater inclusiveness and representation, it is also true that the first 100 digital pictograms make up about 82% of the emoji cake sent between chats, social networks and messages. Are there too many? Who knows: at the moment they are 3.663 and, in fact, we use few of them but often, it happens to everyone to realize sooner or later, they lack sensational ones. The work of the committees that deal with the analysis of candidacies, proposals and approval will still be a long time before a certain balance is built.
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For all categories the Unicode Consortium has built a very simple tool to consult and through which to become aware of which emojis are more or less used. For Animals and nature, for example, the bouquet of flowers is the most popular emoji, followed by the small but widely used subgroup of plants and flowers. The first animal is there butterfly that trims not too much detachment to the rabbit and the dog. For the Travel & Places category, some weather emojis like fire, sun, rainbow, stars and moon. The first of the transport subcategory is the rocket, which obviously takes on different meanings from time to time on success, the beginning of a new path, the achievement of a goal and so on. In short, it is difficult for everyone who uses it to talk about Elon Musk’s space capsules. Among Food and drink stands out birthday cake followed by coffee, beer, champagne, aubergine, strawberry, peach and cherries (also in this case, it is difficult to talk with such intensity of the greengrocer’s shopping) while among the objects the musical notes, the bag of dollars and the crown. The first of the sports subsection in People and Body Parts is one person doing the wheel, in that of the Activities it is instead the soccer ball in front of the basketball and baseball.
The investigation could go on, deriving all kinds of combinations or curiosities. In general, suffice it to say that none of the main sub-categories are really very or not very popular with the exception of four: smiley faces, plants and flowers and emotions are by far the most used. The fourth, the one that collects the flags of the countries, on the other hand, is the least frequented within a macro-category, that of flags in general, which is in last place. They represent a good example of the contradiction, in this case difficult to resolve, of the collection: the flags of the countries constitute the largest collection (258 emoji, the richest is that of mammals with 53 emojis) but they are in fact the least used.
And the pandemic how does it continue to affect our use of emojis? Certainly significant but not all-encompassing and above all not didactic. Sure, the emoji from the syringe – recently retouched to remove the drop of blood that gushed from it – it was 282nd in 2019 and after the vaccination campaign it jumped to 193rd place. Good but not as good as expected. Even the emoji of the virus rose from position 1.086 to 477th. However, this rise in emojis semantically linked to the coronavirus and the pandemic happened “in a way that made it nowhere remotely comparable to the more commonly used emojis, because we had a lot to laugh at and a lot to cry about, whether it was because of the pandemic or not. “Lauren Gawne, co-host of the” Lingthusiasm “podcast and professor of linguistics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, told the New York Times. different or universalistic – they help us to express our feelings.
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