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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.

If you want to understand how the peach emoji has come to represent both the potential impeachment of President Trump and a butt, you must first look to the ancient Sumerians. Cuneiform, their early system of writing, began as a series of pictograms, and some characters represented multiple words or concepts. But it could be "tricky to represent something in the abstract," said Vyvyan Evans, a British linguistics professor and author of "The Emoji Code." So the Sumerians would repurpose an existing pictogram that had resonance with the hard-to-illustrate concept.

As emoji have become more specific in both their appearance and their meaning, their ideographic flexibility has eroded. Emoji are transforming into a large catalog of fixed portraits, rather than a smaller set of flexible ideograms.

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.