Buzz
Fred Benenson, Flickr // CC BY 2.0
Emojis are everywhere: people use them to tell relationship stories, moms incorporate them, and the heart emoji ♥ was even chosen as the Global Language Monitor's word of the year. There's also a version of Moby Dick translated into emojis.
But can emojis truly replace words effectively? Let's look at Emoji Dick—it made a splash, but what does it actually look like when you read it? Here's the first sentence:
Can you figure out what this means? Telephone man sailboat whale okay?
It's the famous opening phrase, "Call me Ishmael." So, the telephone might represent "call", and I assume the speaker is a man, but I can't quite figure out how sailboat whale okay = Ishmael.
Though, maybe it's unreasonable to expect proper names in emoji. So, let's try another sentence, using only common nouns:
Go ahead, give it a shot.
Man taxi poutyface syringe arrow cop heart cyclone?
Ready to throw in the towel?
"It is a way I have of dispelling the spleen and regulating the circulation."
So, I assume the taxi represents driving, the cop signifies regulating, the heart is somewhat similar to the spleen, and the cyclone swirl could be interpreted as circulation. It's clever, but it's not immediately clear from the emojis alone. And as we continue reading, it doesn't get any easier to understand.
I think it's pretty amazing that someone took the time to translate Moby Dick into emoji, and honestly, I don't think I could have done it any better. But that's the issue—no matter how skilled you are with emojis, or whether Unicode eventually adds a "spleen" icon, there are some concepts that just can't be expressed clearly through any combination of little pictures. And I think the creator of Emoji Dick acknowledges this too: the book was ultimately published with the original English text mixed with its emoji "translations"—something you wouldn’t find in a French or Arabic translation of a book.
But it's not just Melville's intricate writing—how would you create an unmistakable emoji for "yesterday"? Or for "parent," distinguishing it from "mother" or "father"? What about verbs (like "run" versus "a runner") or adjectives (such as "independent")? Or those little words in between, like "the," "or," "of," and "me"?
Referring to emoji as a language is like calling a whale a fish. Sure, there are some similarities—both language and emoji can convey meaning, and both whales and fish live in water. But whales and fish don’t do the same thing in the water. For example, fish have gills, while whales need to surface to breathe. Similarly, emoji and language don’t function the same way either.
So, what's the purpose of emoji? If you observe how people actually use them, you'll see we're using emoji as a complement to language, not a complete substitute for it.
Emoji and other creative punctuation marks are like making faces or silly hand gestures while talking. Imagine trying to have a conversation in a monotone with your hands tied behind your back—that’s what texting in plain Standard English feels like. But texting only in emoji is like playing charades—it’s fun for a bit, but if you want to communicate something complex, it falls short.
Part of an ongoing series on internet linguistics.
