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What emoji do people use the most? That's the central question in a new study that looks at emoji use around the world. The company SwiftKey analyzed more than a billion pieces of emoji data, organized by language and country. According to SwiftKey's chief marketing officer, Joe Braidwood, the results were fascinating. Here's a sample of what researchers found: 1. 70 percent of all emojis sent are positive. 2. Canadians lead the charge in their use of money, violence, sports-related, raunchy, and even the poop emoji. 3. Americans are second behind Canada in their love of violent emojis, such as guns. But they also enjoy food emoji: pizza and the chicken drumstick are high-frequency. 4. Australians referenced drugs, alcohol, junk food and holidays much more than any other nation. 5. French really are hopeless romantics and use heart emojis four times more than anyone else. 6. Arabic speakers are big fans of the rose emoji, using it 10 times more than other language speakers. 7. Spanish-speaking Americans used sad faces more than any other language. "The most popular emoji that they used out of the sad faces was the crying emoji."

Ever used an emoji before? Most people have used an emoji in a text or message if they have a phone or laptop. The majority of emoji users are pretty harmless with the meaning behind the use of words. However not all have used it so positively. In fact, more and more law systems are bringing in linguist (emoji) experts as a witness to testify the meaning behind emojis given the context. Which is even more interesting is that some defendants have been convicted partially based on the meaning behind an emoji. For example there is one man who was convicted because of his use of a gun emoji which the expert witness testified the sinical, threatening meaning of the emoji. This article might make you think before you send your next emoji...

A few weeks ago, after I said goodbye to a friend who was moving across the country, I texted her an emoji of a crying face. She replied with an image of chick with its arms outstretched. This exchange might have been heartfelt. It could have been ironic.

Use of emoticons varies by geography, age, gender, and social class-just like dialects or regional accents. Friend groups fall into the habit of using certain emoticons, just as they develop their own slang. Emoji have undoubtedly changed the way we text, Gchat, and tweet-but are they changing language itself? While emoji are more popular than ever, the idea behind them is actually quite old. "There's an old utopian ideal that we could create a kind of a universal pictorial language," says linguist Ben Zimmer. Emoji could even mark a return (regression?) to a more pictographic script. However, Ben Zimmer suggests that emoji help convey tone and emotion and enrich written language.

This article discusses both emoji use, and emoji effects in language and expression. The vast majority of web users use or have used emojis, and the emojis that we use can yield information about us such as our general age and interests. Furthermore, emojis may be a form of language simplification and a return to pictogram communications.

Despite claims that emoji are a universal lingua franca, emojis are neither "universal", nor a true "language". Instead, they are "at most a linguistic tool that is being used to complement our language". In other words, emojis do not and cannot by themselves constitute a meaningful code of communication between two parties. Rather, they are used as a way of enhancing texts and social media messages like a kind of additional punctuation. They help express nuance, tone and emotion in the written word. Emojis offer a chance for the average email writer, SMSer or social media poster to imply an emotional context to their messages, to express empathy. With emojis, they can do this as simply and naturally as using a facial expression or gesture when talking to somebody face-to-face. Yet relying too heavily on emojis to bridge that gap can cause problems of its own. We may all have access to more or less the same emojis through our smartphone keyboards, but what we mean when we use those emojis actually varies greatly, depending on culture, language, and generation.

Emoji, however inelegant as they may seem, have become a language of their own, a way to transcend the limits of one's native tongue to communicate with others worldwide. Instagram found that as emoji use rose across the app, the use of Internet slang formed from English letters went down, and that the two phenomena were strongly correlated. That could explain why you may be seeing fewer instances of "Lol" on Instagram photo captions, while smiley face emoji are becoming more prevalent. "It is a rare privilege to observe the rise of a new language," Thomas Dimson, a software engineer on Instagram's data team, said in a company blog post on Friday. "Emoji are becoming a valid and near-universal method of expression in all languages." Even as the limits of emoji characters are reached by the number of available emoji - around 700 by most standard shared measures - users are finding new ways to use them to communicate. Pairing two or more emoji together, for instance, can form rudimentary sentences or sentiments for others to understand.

This article focuses on the emergence of emoji's and how widespread it has become. The first emoji alphabet was created in 2008, and adopted in 2011 by Apple. Even though emoji have only been around for a short time, it has gained huge popularity. Some of its successes are that it was crowned as this years' top-trending word by the Global Language Monitor, and was even added to the Oxford dictionary. According to an emoji tracker by twitter, "people are averaging 250 to 350 emoji tweets a second," showing how culturally diverse emoji has become. Although emoji are rapidly increasing in popularity, it is still not considered its own language because it has been criticized as being too limited. However, it is sure to gain more support in the mere future and maybe even replace some of the English language, as emoji's are said to be used as punctuation, emphasis, and as a replacement for words or to replace words altogether.

A common occurrence in text messages is the emoji. More people use emojis worldwide than the amount of people that are fluent in the world's most popular language, Mandarin. With the evolution from "keyboard emojis" [i.e. :) and >:( ] to what we currently know as emojis (the little pictures of faces and whatnot), we have developed these "unwritten definitions" for each distinct emoji, such as the different meanings behind each of the smiling emojis (

There are around 340 million L1 English speakers, and 600 million ESL speakers, making the language accessible to an estimated billion people, English is also the primary or official language in 101 countries. However, Vyvyan Evans, British linguist, notes emoji are an even more intuitively accessible global communication mode. 3.2 billion people have regular Internet access in the world, and 92 percent-plus of those 3.2 billion people regularly send emojis. So from that perspective, Emoji leaves English in the dust, in terms of use and uptake. Most people think that when we communicate in default face-to-face mode, language is what's driving effective communication, and in fact it's not. Communication requires different channels of information - language is just one. The two other important ones are paralanguage, and that's how you're delivering the words, so tone of voice, and the really big one is kinesics, and that has to do with action-based, nonverbal communication. Emoji functions analogously to tone of voice and to body language in text-speak, and without it, we're reduced communicators.

This article explains how emojis are used globally because they can be understood by anyone regardless of what language they speak. Everyone knows what emojis mean because the things they express are universal. This article also says that emojis can be used to add clarity and nuance to text messages, not just emotion. However, emojis cannot currently be considered a language because they don't have grammar and can't be combined to mean something more complex, although this might happen someday, as novels such as Alice in Wonderland have been translated into emojis.

Decoding pictures as part of communication has been at the root of written language since there was such a thing as written language. "What is virtually certain," writes Andrew Robinson in Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction, is "that the first written symbols began life as pictures." Pictograms-i.e., pictures of actual things, like a drawing of the sun-were the very first elements of written communication, found in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. From pictograms, which are literal representations, we moved to logograms, which are symbols that stand in for a word ($, for example) and ideograms, which are pictures or symbols that represent an idea or abstract concept. Emoji can somewhat magically function as pictograms and ideograms at the same time.

emojis were born from a man named Shigetaka Kurita back in the late 1990s. They came up with emojis as a way to appeal to teens. Emoji which is a japanese neologism means "picture word". A bunch of different emojis can actually be traced back to some Japanese custom or tradition.

SwiftKey, a keyboard app, did an analysis of one billion emoji from aggregate SwiftKey Cloud data. The interactive map shows which emoji are most frequently used by which state. The full report can be loaded from https://blog.swiftkey.com/the-united-states-of-emoji-which-state-does-your-emoji-use-most-resemble/.

This article is about how emojis are changing the way that we think/communicate with each other. Emojis are changing our brains -- scientists discovered that when we look at a smiley face emoji online, the same parts of our brain are activated as we look at a real human face. Later on in the article, it talks about how to use emojis to promote whatever message you are trying to get across a person or party, or how to use emojis according to the kind of personality you have.

This journal article discusses the prevalent use of emojis and how they are becoming more integrated into our language. It talks about the literal and metaphorical meanings of emojis, functions of emojis, and emoji interpretation across different cultures. It explains how pictography has been used in the past and what the future could hold for emojis.

Emojis were Oxford Dictionary's word of the year. And it's quickly becoming the universal language of the Internet -- after Apple included an emoji keyboard on its phones five years ago. It's estimated 6 billion emojis are sent each day. Emojis are becoming a secret language for kids.

This article talks about emojis and why they are not good to use when texting someone. An edition of the newspaper USA Today last week chose to supplement all its front-page stories with Facebook's new "emoji reactions"*. Of course, the internet's response was largely one of horrified bemusement (currently we lack an emoji for "horrified bemusement" so, apologies readers, you're going to have to do the hard work yourselves by reading the words the old-fashioned way).

The year 2015 could be called the year of the emoji. They have landed a teenage boy in a police cell and prompted Vladimir Putin's wrath in Russia, and the loveable smiley faces are even set to come to life in their own Hollywood film.

Emoji are already butting their heads with traditional words, but could they take over completely? The year 2015 could be called the year of the emoji. They have landed a teenage boy in a police cell and prompted Vladimir Putin's wrath in Russia, and the loveable smiley faces are even set to come to life in their own Hollywood film.

If you are on the far side of 70, as I am, you may not even know what emoticons and Emojis are, but trust me, your grandchildren do. Emoticons - those little smiley face icons used to show various emotions, and their descendants, Emojis - icons illustrating almost anything, from Santa Claus to a screaming cat to a pile of excrement - have become so popular with young people who communicate by texting and emailing, that some Emoji experts converse only through pictographs. You don't need to know the other person's foreign language - or even how to read!

The brain interprets irony or sarcasm conveyed by an emoji in the same way that sarcasm is conveyed verbally, according to a new report from researchers at the linguistics department of the University of Illinois Researchers measured brain activity of native English-speaking college students reading sentences using various emoji at the end. They read sentences with positive, negative or ironic emoji at the end.

Interesting article exploring the rise of emoji as a "language", also how African American Vernacular English Twitter users may be creating their own subcultural emoji language, where emoji have acquired unambiguous, shared meanings that're different from mainstream meanings.

This article discusses the important impact emojis have had on digital communication. "Emoji help add context to our digital communication so we can distinguish the tone or mood of the message. They also act as flair, letting people show a bit of their personality and have some fun in the process."