4.a Replicative Functions

Let us first consider the replicative functions of emoji, that is, the way emoji can replace more traditional linguistic items in sentences and produce the same effect. The emoji set does not itself constitute a language – emoji do not have anything like a grammar – but emoji can nonetheless do lots of the same things components of a language can do.Footnote ¹³ Firstly, they can function like words, and can have semantic content. Indeed, they are sometimes characterised as words; in 2015, the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji was named the Oxford Word of the Year (Oxford University Press, 2015). King points out that emoji can function as both nouns and verbs (Reference King, Moser and Xhignesse2018, p. 2). The sentence ‘I love ’, for example, can be used to express the proposition ‘I love pizza’, with the pizza emoji functioning as a noun. The sentence ‘ pizza’ expresses the same proposition, with the heart emoji functioning as a verb. Research confirms that readers can easily comprehend sentences in which emoji have replaced words (Scheffler et al., Reference Scheffler, Brandt, de la Fuente and Nenchev2022)

Some have even translated books into emoji, Emoji Dick (Benenson, Reference Benenson and Turk2010), for example, is a crowd sourced translation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick into emoji. Or at least, so it is sometimes described. It is debatable whether projects like these are really translations, since they cannot preserve all the grammatical features of the target sentences. ‘Call me Ishmael’, for example, is ‘translated’ in Emoji Dick with the following emoji string: a telephone, a man's face, a sailboat, a whale, and an ‘OK’ sign (Reference Benenson and Turk2010, p. 15). This ‘translation’ does not preserve, for example, the imperatival mood of the original sentence. As such, I think these ‘translations’ are perhaps best regarded as exercises in the transmutation of an artwork from one medium to another – in this case, from literary art to visual art.

I also caveat the acknowledgement that emoji can function like words with the observation that only some emoji seem to have obviously semantic content. It is easy to see how pictogram emoji (those that represent objects through their resemblance to them) could be used to express semantic content. It is harder to see how reaction emoji, like those depicting faces, expressing happiness, sadness, and confusion, et cetera, could contribute to sentence meaning. That is not to say that they do not have other, familiar communicative functions, though.

Secondly, some emoji can function as punctuation. There is both a simple way to use emoji as punctuation and a more complex way. The simple way is to use those emoji which depict standard punctuation marks – the emoji keyboard offers you, for example, a series of different coloured question marks and exclamation marks, which you can use in place of the question marks and exclamation marks on the standard keyboard. The complex way is to use emoji which do not depict punctuation marks as punctuation marks. For example, emoji depicting facial expressions are often used in place of full stops at the end of sentences. Early research on emoticons observed that they served a similar function. Kris Markman and Sae Oshima observe that emoticons are ‘most typically deployed at the end of sentences or clauses (when part of a parenthetical remark), or turns at chat, either with or in place of standard sentence-final punctuation marks’, and that when used as such, they function ‘to close off the sentence or thought by confirming the action performed by the text’ (Reference Markman and Oshima2007, p. 5).

In addition to functioning as components of sentences, emoji can also be used to perform illocutionary acts. According to J.L. Austin, illocutionary acts are the acts we perform in speaking, like orders, assertions, and promises (Reference Austin1976). These acts typically (or, depending on who you ask, necessarily) satisfy a set of what Austin called ‘felicity conditions’ – requirements on the successful performance of the act. For example, it is a felicity condition of promising that the act you are promising to perform is in the future, and not the past – you cannot promise to do something you have already done (Searle, Reference Searle1969, pp. 57–61). We typically, but not necessarily, perform illocutionary acts using words. For example, provided all felicity conditions for ordering are met, I could order you to shut the door by saying, ‘Shut the door!’ Yet we can also perform them with gestures. For example, if I asked you whether you consent to my borrowing your pen, and you give a ‘thumbs up’ gesture in response, we might say that you consented via gesture rather than via utterance.

Emoji provide yet another way of performing illocutionary acts. Some emoji mimic the same gestures we perform in face-to-face conversation – consider, for example, the thumbs-up emoji and the waving emoji. But you could perhaps also perform an illocutionary act by stringing emoji together. In 2015, for example, an American teenager was arrested for terroristic threats, in part because he had posted Facebook statuses about the police which contained the emoji string ‘’ – two revolvers (now rendered as water pistols) pointing at a police officer (Evans, Reference Evans2015). The arresting police department clearly thought the emoji amounted to a threat, which is plausibly a type of illocutionary act.

In thinking about these replicative functions of emoji, one may wonder why we would choose to use emoji when we already have linguistic mechanisms available to us which fulfil the same function – for example, why end a sentence with a smiling emoji when a punctuation mark would do just fine?

A first reason for using emoji instead of words and other components of written languages is that they are easier or quicker to use. In their research into why people used emoji, Henriette Cramer, Paloma de Juan and Joel Tetreault found that some participants reported using emoji for efficiency reasons; stating ‘It's shorter and more graphic’, and ‘It's all about a quick response and saving time on the go’ (Reference Cramer, de Juan and Tetreault2016, p. 4). One example message they considered was someone writing ‘Ok. I'll probably head out for a short one later. Good chance of rain anyway ’ (Ibid). The emoji at the end convey quickly that the sender will be going on a cycling ride, rather than walking or driving. These gains on the sender's end may be offset by costs on the receiver's end, however. Scheffler et al. found that when emoji are used to encode lexical content, they are decoded more slowly than words (2022).

A second reason for favouring emoji over traditional linguistic devices might be the fact that emoji can transcend specific languages. A person who only speaks Chinese, and a person who only speaks Portuguese, for example, can both understand the meaning of a smiling emoji. At least some emoji have been found to have stable semantic content across multiple languages (Barbieri et al., Reference Barbieri, Kruszewski, Ronzano and Saggion2016). Vyvyan Evans, meanwhile, describes emoji as ‘incontrovertibly the world's first truly universal form of communication’ (Reference Evans2017, p. 20), whilst King observes that emoji ‘can transcend language barriers’ (Reference King, Moser and Xhignesse2018, p. 3).Footnote ¹⁴ We should resist the urge to be too idealistic about this universality, as there are documented cultural differences in how emoji are used and interpreted (Park et al., Reference Park, Barash, Fink and Cha2013), but it does seem that at least some emoji facilitate communication across languages.

A third reason for preferring to use emoji might be that they can multitask in a way words and other written devices often cannot – not only can an emoji replace a word and thereby express semantic content, but it can also, for example, add extra information about mood at the same time (see §4.b), or serve an aesthetic function (see §4.c). You might choose to use an emoji rather than a full stop because not only will it function as punctuation, but it also might help you indicate the end of your turn, which you would normally indicate with body language (e.g., taking a breath or looking at your interlocutor).

A fourth reason you might choose to use emoji rather than standard linguistic devices is that they facilitate coded speech, and offer you some plausible deniability if you are accused of engaging in harmful and/or criminal speech. Let us return to the two court cases I mentioned at the beginning of the paper. In one, the defendant's use of the crown emoji, the high heels emoji, and the bags of money emoji were regarded as evidence that he was proposing to act as a pimp for someone. In the other, the defendant's use of an emoji with crossed out eyes, followed by his girlfriend's nickname, was seen as evidence that he had deliberately shot her.

A crown, a bag of money, and a high-heeled shoe do not literally mean prostitution in the same way ‘prostitution’ means prostitution. Indeed, if we were to attribute semantic content to these emoji, we would say instead that they mean crown, bags of money, and high heeled shoes. But the defendant in the first case was using them in a euphemistic way, a bit like how some use the eggplant emoji. These emoji have acquired associations with certain practices and activities, such that when the defendant included them in a message he could convey ideas of prostitution. Since the activities he was alluding to were illegal, it was surely safer to communicate in this kind of coded language than to ask direct questions like, ‘Would you like to work as a sex worker for me?’. If accused of pimping, he could claim that his messages were misinterpreted.

Similarly, in the second case, the defendant could have sent his friend a message reading, ‘I killed [girlfriend's name]’. Yet that message would count as strong evidence against him in court. An emoji which is associated with death, disorientation and dizziness sufficed to get enough information across to the recipient, without leaving the sender obviously on the hook. As Unicode themselves observe, emoji can provide a ‘useful ambiguity’, allowing the sender ‘to convey many different possible concepts at the same time’.Footnote ¹⁵ In both cases, however, there was enough evidence overall to convict the defendants. Moreover, as emoji grow more popular, they may grow more conventionalised, and as such the plausible deniability one gains from using them may decrease over time.

4.b Compensatory Functions

Communication online (barring video calls) is largely disembodied; you do not see or hear your interlocutors, but instead receive only their typed messages. This makes it radically different from face-to-face conversation, where we are supplied with all kinds of information over and above the words a speaker utters; we can hear their tone, pitch, volume, and rhythm; watch their body language and the gestures they make; analyse their facial expressions; and follow their gaze. In online communication, absent these additional sources of information, we are likely to run into interpretative difficulties; it is harder to judge the speaker's mood, or their sincerity, or when their conversational turn has ended, for example.

Here is where emoji can come in handy. As King puts it, ‘we use emoji to perform the function we normally leave to prosody, facial expression, and other features of spoken or in-person communication’ (Reference King, Moser and Xhignesse2018, p. 2). Similarly, Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch argue that emoji are a way to add back in the ‘information provided by tone of voice and body language in face-to-face communication’ (Reference Gawne and McCulloch2019). Georg Albert writes that ‘unquestionably, emoji are valuable for emulating paralinguistic and nonverbal signs such as facial expressions and gestures, which occur in face-to-face conversations but not in written forms of communication’ (Reference Albert, Thurlow, Dürscheid and Diémoz2020, p. 66), whilst Vyvyan Evans writes that ‘putting a sad face at the end of the expression provides a non-verbal cue, a metacomment, showing us how to interpret the words’ (Reference Evans2017, p. 53). These theorists are characterising emoji as serving something like a compensatory function, filling back in what is lost when one replaces face-to-face spoken communication with technologically mediated written communication.

Emoji are not the only way to fill this gap, of course. We have several other methods available to us. For example, there is a convention of using capital letters to indicate that you are shouting, and a convention of using lots of exclamation points to indicate the intensity of an emotion. Emoticons, and the original smiley face – :-) – also served a compensatory function, enabling writers to indicate emotions and sincerity. But because there is such a wide range of emoji (depicting, for example, a very wide range of facial expressions and emotions), they are especially good at fulfilling this compensatory function, and can add back quite a large amount of information previously lost in online messaging.

A first compensatory function emoji can serve is, as I alluded to at the end of the last section, indicating the end of a conversational turn. Markman and Oshima make this claim about emoticons, the emoji predecessor (Reference Markman and Oshima2007), but it seems clearly true of emoji, too. Conversational analysts Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson proposed that we think of conversations as involving a series of alternating turns by interlocutors; interlocutor A takes a turn, then interlocutor B, then interlocutor A, et cetera (Reference Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson1974). Though these turns may overlap – you may begin your turn just as I am finishing mine – there is a general norm that interlocutors speak one at a time. As such, it is important that we know when a speaker's turn has finished or is at least coming to an end, so that we know when to take up our own turn. In face-to-face conversation we rely on many cues – silence from the speaker, eye contact, cadence, body language, and more. Online, these cues often are not available, but emoji can compensate. Markman and Oshima write that emoticons can be used to signal that ‘a complete turn at chat has been taken’ (Reference Markman and Oshima2007, p. 10), thereby enabling the speaker to give the floor, so to speak, to the hearer. To use a different analogy, they can function like the word ‘over’ in radio conversations.

Emoji can also be used to end not just a turn but an entire conversation. Ryan Kelly and Leon Watts note that an emoji can function ‘as a signal that a message has been received but that the recipient has little to say in response’ (Reference Kelly and Watts2015). They quote a survey participant who told them, ‘Yesterday we were talking about pancake day, so I just sent some pancakes [an emoji] and that kind of just, finished the conversation. It kind of just, yeah I think it says you have nothing else to say.’ This message, Kelly and Watts write, ‘may be seen as affinity-building in that the recipient is acknowledging the sender's message while offering a mutually interpretable signal indicating that they have little to offer in reply’ (ibid.). Sending the pancake emoji enables the speaker to acknowledge receipt of the prior message and close the conversation without making their interlocutor feel ignored.

A second compensatory function of emoji is to express affective and emotional states, which might usually be expressed by tone, expression, and body language. As a simple example, a smiling emoji can be used instead of a real smile to indicate contentment or pleasure. Indeed, Linda Kaye et al. found that facial stimuli and emoji can be processed in ‘a largely equivalent way’ (Reference Kaye, Rodriguez-Cuadrado, Malone, Wall, Gaunt, Mulvey and Graham2021, p. 7; see also Gantiva et al., Reference Gantiva, Sotaquirá, Araujo and Cuervo2020). The emoji keyboard provides users with a wide variety of facial expressions, enabling the expression of a wide variety of affective states. Research by Monica Riordan shows that non-facial emoji, like hearts or roses, are also used to express affect (Reference Riordan2017).

Sometimes emoji are used to establish the overall emotional tone of a message, especially when this tone is ambiguous from the text alone. In some cases, this replaces the clarificatory function of facial expression, prosody, and body language, and thus counts as a kind of compensatory function, but in other cases it adds clarification that would not be easily achieved in face-to-face communication, in which case it is more of a supplementary function (which I discuss in more detail in §4.c). For example, we can use emoji to indicate whether we are speaking seriously or jokingly, an indication that might usually be made possible through body language and prosody. Imagine that you wish to communicate in a face-to-face conversation that you think a proposed plan is misguided. You might do this by uttering the words, ‘Great idea’, with a sarcastic tone. Yet if you typed ‘Great idea’ in an instant messaging chat, it would not be immediately clear that you were being sarcastic, because your interlocutor does not have your tone or facial expressions available to them to interpret. Adding a winking or laughing emoji might add in this extra information usually provided by paralinguistic behaviours.

Similarly, you could add this kind of emoji at the end of a joke to communicate that your words were intended as non-serious speech. Ryan Kelly and Leon Watts quote a survey participant explaining how they use a winking emoji: ‘If you're saying something that, you know, that'll wind them up, but and, if you didn't put the winky face next to it, then it could be misconstrued as like, starting on them, or, like quite an aggressive statement, so, yeah, they really help make sure that you don't get into any trouble’ (Reference Kelly and Watts2015). The winking emoji described functions to establish a tone of jocularity and affection, rather than aggression. Indeed, this use of emoji to indicate tone was Scott Fahlman's vision for the :-) emoticon. Similarly, Eli Dresner and Susan Herring note that the winking smiley in particular ‘is often used as an indicator that the writer is joking, teasing, or otherwise not serious about the message's propositional content’ (Reference Dresner and Herring2010, p. 256).

This function of the emoji's neighbour, the emoticon, has been taken seriously in court cases. In Ghanam v. Does (2014), a Detroit city official accused the defendants of making defamatory statements about him on a political message board. The Court of Appeals found that because one of the defendants used the ‘:-P’ emoticon, which depicts a face with a tongue out, it was ‘patently clear that the commenter was making a joke’, and thus that they were not defaming the official.Footnote ¹⁶

A third compensatory function of emoji is to replace gestures. Gawne and McCulloch understand gestures as a kind of intentionally communicative body movement. Evidence shows that gesturing is cognitively useful for the speaker herself, as it helps her better conceptualise what she is saying (Krauss, Chen, and Gottesman, Reference Krauss, Chen, Gottesman and McNeill2000; Kita, Alibali, and Chu, Reference Kita, Alibali and Chu2017), but it also provides useful information to hearers. For example, a person gesturing while speaking can provide useful spatial information (Kita and Özyürek, Reference Kita and Özyürek2003). Gestures vary in their conventionality. Some gestures are highly idiosyncratic and unstructured. Imagine, for example, the gestures a speaker might make while trying to describe a sculpture. These gestures are very hard to parse for the hearer if they do not also have access to the words the speaker is uttering. Other gestures are highly conventional, like a thumbs up. Gawne and McCullloch call these kind of gestures emblems (Reference Gawne and McCulloch2019). These have a recognisable meaning even when not accompanied by speech, but their meaning can vary across cultures. Sign language gestures, like those of BSL, meanwhile, are extremely conventional and form a complete language.

Some emoji encode emblematic gestures – you can send a thumbs up emoji, a fingers crossed emoji, or a waving emoji, for example. Others enable deictic gestures, like pointing. We can use these emoji to direct visual attention to particular words or images. Gawne and McCulloch also describe the use of emoji as beat gestures. Speakers use these gestures in spoken conversations to add emphasis – for example, a speaker might click her fingers between each word, or clap at the beginning or end of the utterance. Emoji offer a way of doing this – Gawne and McCulloch point to messages like ‘’ as an example (Reference Gawne and McCulloch2019).

4.c Supplementary Functions

I will finish by considering some of the new capabilities emoji afford us in online conversations. Firstly, they can be used as visual euphemisms. In spoken, face-to-face conversation, we are reliant on verbal euphemisms – we use inoffensive words or phrases to talk about topics which are unpleasant, offensive, explicit, or taboo. For example, we might say ‘She passed away’ instead of ‘She died’, or ‘They hooked up’ instead of ‘They had sex’. In online communication, emoji offer a new way of speaking euphemistically – the use of the eggplant emoji as a phallic symbol is a case in point. In this way emoji have increased our ability to speak indirectly.

Relatedly, emoji have also offered us a new kind of politeness device. Politeness theorists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson argue that throughout conversations we are constantly trying to manage both our own ‘face’ and the ‘face’ of others. There are two kinds of face, and hence two kinds of politeness strategy. Negative face is a person's ‘basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction’ (Reference Brown and Levinson1987, p. 61), i.e., a kind of freedom of action. Our concern for other's negative face explains why we often verbally soften requests to make sure the hearer does not feel we are imposing on their freedom of action. We might say, for example, ‘I'm really sorry to be a pain, but would you mind shutting the door?’, rather than ‘Please shut the door’. Positive face, meanwhile, is a person's positive self-image (Ibid). We all like to preserve our positive face in the sense that we like to think that others hold us in high regard. We can preserve and anoint the positive face of others by complimenting them, for example.

Emoji can function as both positive and negative politeness devices. If we are sending a message that might appear to impose on the recipient's freedom of action and thus threaten their negative face, we can soften the message with emoji that signal positive affect. Dresner and Herring note, for example, that a winking emoji can downgrade an utterance to a ‘less face-threatening speech act’, and a smiley at the end of a serious request might indicate that the author is ‘anxious about imposing’ (Reference Dresner and Herring2010, p. 257). Carmen Maíz-Arévalo, meanwhile, finds in their research that participants employ emoticons ‘whenever they feel the need to safeguard the addressee's face’ (Reference Maíz-Arévalo2015, p. 142), for example adding smiles and winks at the end of directives and suggestions.

If we want to anoint the recipient's positive face, meanwhile, we might also send emoji with positive valence. For example, we might supplement a verbal compliment with a heart eyes emoji, or a kiss. Politeness strategies were already available to us in face-to-face conversation, both verbally and physically (a smile, for example, might be a positive politeness strategy), and sometimes emoji use might mimic these – we can smile with emoji instead of in real life, for example. But sometimes emoji offer new politeness devices not available offline – for example, there is no offline equivalent to sending a heart emoji after an otherwise slightly awkward or imposing message.

Secondly, emoji facilitate multimodal artistic expression. Throughout history we have found ways to make written text more appealing – for example, through calligraphy, marginalia, and doodles – but before emoji this was hard to do with typed text online. Emoji, however, provide a way to decorate or adorn our messages. They hence serve an aesthetic function as well as a communicative one. Cramer at al. quote a participant in their study who had sent a friend the text, ‘Making soup ’: ‘I included [the emoji] because like a hot bowl of soup waiting for you after driving home from work on a cold wintry day, it's a heart warming sight. Without this fun decoration, the txt would have been dry, boring, joyless’ (Reference Cramer, de Juan and Tetreault2016, p. 4). Similarly, Unicode themselves observe that people like to use emoji on social media ‘to add color and whimsy to their messages’.Footnote ¹⁷

Not only can users of emoji add images, they can also (unlike users of emoticons alone) add colour to their messages and posts. The addition of colour cannot replicate any devices of written language, nor does it compensate for prosodic, expressive, and gestural dimensions of face-to-face communication. Prior to the invention of emoji, to refer to a specific colour in written text we would only be able to describe it or point to it. Now users can use emoji to refer to colours, and to represent experiences and ideas in very fine-grained ways. In defending their gestural account of emoji, Gawne and McCulloch note that ‘emoji may contain colour and details that are difficult to represent gesturally’, observing that ‘it is unclear how one would distinguish between, say, a red apple and a green apple in gesture, but they are readily distinguished as emoji’ (Reference Gawne and McCulloch2019).

For a long time, artists have been able to include text (printed or handwritten) in visual art. Think of the inclusion of newspaper clippings in the still-lifes of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, for example, or the use of text in surrealist René Magritte's ‘The Treachery of Images’. In these artworks, conventional, uniform text was included amidst idiosyncratic, individualised painting. Emoji offer in some ways the reverse of this; they enable us to include conventional, uniform images amongst our idiosyncratic written messages (though these messages are not quite as unconstrained and idiosyncratic as visual art, constrained as they are by much stricter linguistic conventions).