Since the widespread popularity of smartphones and web communication, the emoji has become more important in popular culture than ever before. 2015 has seen the use of emoji rise dramatically, with the emoji 'Face With Tears of Joy' being named 2015's Word of The Year by the Oxford Dictionary, as it has been the most used emoji across all platforms, and one of the most used characters overall.
A social network named emojli, was launched last year on which users could only communicate through emoji; , over 50,000 people had already reserved usernames (consisting of strings of emoji) two days after it's announcment. Some enthusiasts even believe emoji have literary potential. After raising $3,500 on Kickstarter, data engineer Fred Benenson set out to translate every line of Moby Dick into emoji. Using Amazon’s crowd-sourcing project Mechanical Turk, Benenson managed to find thousands of strangers willing to work on the project. Three people translated each line of Melville’s text;with second group selecting the best translation of the three. This book , named Emoji Dick, is 200 dollars for a hard copy.
Emoticons and emoji are changing the way we communicate faster than linguists can keep up with, and according to Ben Zimmer, it is the wild west of the emoji era, in which its evolution in linguistics is completely organic.
At the forefront of the research into emoji use today is Stanford-trained linguist Tyler Schnoebelen. By analyzing emoticon use on Twitter, Schnoebelen has found that use of emoticons varies by geography, age, gender, and social class—just like dialects or regional accents.
Different social circles also tend to use different emojis for communicating, with newcomers to a circle expanding or adapting their emoji vocabulary to fit in, similar to someone learning new slang or colloquialisms.
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