Language of the Week: Emoji

You may have seen on the uTalk app that you can now search for words in any of our languages by using emoji. With emoji becoming the fastest growing language in Britain, we have decided to make it our language of the week!

If you’re anything like me, the most frequent way you choose to stay in touch with friends and family is by text messaging. If I think about it, I don’t even know what my ringtone sounds like, and I only answer my phone if I’m expecting an important call, otherwise, everyone that knows me just sends a text.

Furthermore, I overheard this conversation the other day:

‘So he called me in the middle of the day and I thought, omg, what a freak, why can’t he just text me?‘

Okay, I was part of the conversation, but anyway you get the idea.

Nevertheless, sometimes it can be quite challenging to express your exact feelings or tone in a text, and so you risk being misunderstood by the recipient or worse – come off as too serious when you’re actually joking. So at some point in the past, the techies have come up with this brilliant way to make our text conversations more fun and emotive: emojis!

Now, some of you may not know what they are and that’s okay – my boss didn’t know either, until a couple of days ago when our app was updated with this brilliant way of searching for words by using emoji. I admit – I love emoji! They’re cute and funny and a great way to interact with your friends without using actual words.

Did you know?

The word emoji comes from Japan, with the ‘e’ meaning picture and ‘moji’ meaning character or letter.

There are more than 6 billion emoji sent worldwide everyday, with more than half of these being smiley faces.

Some emoji are confusing…

Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick has been translated into emoji; the book was released with the title Emoji Dick.

Many celebrities love emoji, with Roger Federer recently tweeting his whole day in emoji during Wimbledon. And in April, Andy Murray tweeted his wedding day in emoji:

🌞☔😂👔💅💇😂👰😂🚗💒💃👫🙏💍💏👏📝🎹📷🎥🚗🍷🍴🎂🎊🎉👯🎶🎤🍹🍻🍷🍺🍩🍦🍷🍹🍸🍺🌙❤💕😘💤💤💤💤💤💤💤

— Andy Murray (@andy_murray) April 11, 2015

Even Australia’s Foreign Affairs minster, Julie Bishop gave the first ever political emoji interview on Buzzfeed.

So go ahead and see which ones have been matched with which uTalk words by our brilliant developers! Which is your favourite emoji? We love to hear from you, so please do join in the conversation here on the blog, or on Facebook or Twitter.

Ioana and Alex