Are Emoji Becoming the World’s First Universal Language?

One day, in a class she teaches called Communication Among Cultures, Jordana Garbati, a writing professor at U of T Mississauga, noticed her students had suddenly become energized. They were talking about emoji – the little faces and icons people use to season their digital messages. “They were going on and on,” she says. Why do people make the emoji choices they do? How can the same simple image (a skull, say) mean completely different things to different people?

Garbati’s PhD is in education with a focus on applied linguistics, and it was from that angle that she began to wonder: Does this form of expression, lingua franca of millennials and Gen Z, have the potential to become a true universal language, an Esperanto for the digital age?

That joy she saw bubbling up in her undergrads – Garbati realized she’d seen it somewhere else, in someone who is not a digital native at all: her father. “His first language isn’t English – it’s Italian,” she says. “Sometimes he’ll string three or four emoji together, like a sentence, and expect the rest of us to understand. Often, I don’t have a clue, but my mom speaks Dad, so she’s often the translator.”

There is a saying: Where your own enthusiasm meets the world’s deep needs, that’s where you need to dig. Charged with a sense of possibility, Garbati quickly roughed out a proposal for an undergraduate class. Beginning this winter, the newly minted “Emoji Rhetoric: A New Paradigm in Communications” is being offered at U of T Mississauga.

If “emoji” is indeed a language – and the question of what deserves that designation will be lustily debated in the course – then it’s one with a far shorter history than most. The emoji we use today – to add nuance or irony, to take the sting off or pile emphasis on – emerged from two converging streams in the 1980s. The “emoticon” trend in America and the “kaomoji” trend in Japan (from kao for “face” and moji for “characters”) both featured the ingenious use of keystrokes to make – :0 – recognizable facial expressions. The actual little impish gestures and emblems we now call emoji began appearing on Japanese phones in the 1990s, and quickly spread across the world. “There are almost 4,000 emoji that are officially recognized,” Garbati says. You could do a lot with that many characters in your “alphabet.” You could probably communicate something meaningful.

There are almost 4,000 emoji that are officially recognized.”

Garbati reaches up and pulls down from her bookshelf a tome the size of a brick. It’s 720 pages long. The title: Emoji Dick. Moby Dick in emoji. “I’m not going to assign this – that might be cruel and unusual – but the person behind the project, Fred Benenson, is coming as a guest speaker,” Garbati says. “He’s in New York City so we’ll have him Zoom in.”

Surely, if there are enough tools in the chest to have a go at recreating a literary masterpiece, then most of the emoji we might reasonably need have already been invented, right?

Not exactly. Because emoji grew so quickly and helter-skelter, there remain significant holes in their coverage. New emoji are continually being pitched, and a multinational committee called the Unicode Consortium gives each candidate the thumbs up or thumbs down. Among the recent inductees: “exhausted face” and “leafless tree.”

Garbati is herself a (non-voting) member of the Unicode Consortium. By virtue of this lofty status, she is claiming the authority to act as a judge in one of the major assignments in her course: Propose your own emoji that the world needs right now.

Garbati is an educator and trained as an applied linguist, but this is actually a course in rhetoric, or persuasive communication. So, after coming up with their emoji, the students will make the case for why it should be included on every smartphone. Will everyone understand it? Can it cross cultural boundaries without much room for misinterpretation? Can it be used in a string – that is, would it make sense in a “sentence”? (Garbati briefly toyed with the idea of accepting presentations entirely in emoji. “But then I thought, what objective would that serve? You’re sacrificing a lot of range of expression.”)

In the event some student, maybe angling for extra credit, asks her what her emoji would be, Garbati has an answer: an icon of a stovetop espresso maker, an Italian coffee or moka pot. “I want that one because I talk about coffee a lot, I think about coffee a lot; it’s part of my heritage; it’s what I enjoy. And the existing coffee emoji (a utilitarian white cup and saucer) does not cover all the things coffee means. The question is whether there are enough people out there who resonate with what that little coffeemaker means to me.”

Musing about all the ways the course could go, Garbati quickly realized coming up with material wouldn’t be a problem. “I thought, I can take the language or linguistics perspective here, or the intercultural perspective. I’ll leave room in the course for students to explore emoji in a way they’re interested in, and tailor projects to their own area of focus – whether that’s anthropology or gender studies or business communication. Marketing students might delve into the universality: you can go into stores anywhere in the world and there’s likely going to be something sold with emoji. History students might want to trace emoji’s ancestry – you can go back pretty far. Hieroglyphics are early emoji, you could argue.”

Not long ago, it occurred to Garbati to try an experiment. In real life, we count on body language to make ourselves clear. In fact, words and gestures are so entwined that if you tie people’s hands behind their back while they’re speaking, they will sometimes speak differently, struggling for workarounds. What if, in the same vein, she placed a restriction on her students: today you can text all you want but you can’t use emoji. What would happen? Would their communication be hampered, or slowed? Would it invite the possibility of being misunderstood? Would they resort to making a phone call instead?

“I could see them worrying that everyone is mad at them because there were no happy-face emoji today!” Garbati says.

Science is a cruel mistress.

There should be an emoji for that.

“Emoji Rhetoric: A New Paradigm in Communications” is being offered at U of T Mississauga in Winter 2025. The second-year course is part of the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy.

Decoding Emoji Dick

A whale of a tale in tiny icons

Professor Jordana Garbati isn’t expecting her students to read all 700-plus pages of it – she hasn’t even done so herself – but the book Emoji Dick will be on the syllabus for her new winter-term class “Emoji Rhetoric: a New Paradigm in Communications.”

Emoji Dick. That’s Moby Dick translated into emoji. A literary artifact so, well, novel that the U.S. Library of Congress snapped it up for their collection in 2014.

Value added for Garbati’s students: its author, Fred Benenson, will attend a class via Zoom.

“I invited him because he seems intriguing, and honestly, the book is unlike anything I’d seen,” says Garbati. “We’ll look at a few pages of text and discuss the translation of the words to emoji.”

Benenson’s process here was unique, to say the least. He crowdsourced every sentence on the Internet – with the highest-voted emoji “translation” making the cut. “The translations aren’t direct,” Garbati says. “I imagine that if I gave the word sentences to students and asked them to translate using emoji, there would be a lot of different submissions. For example, emoji for the sentence, ‘I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself’ include a heart and a pasta. Why?”

Garbati adds that she is curious about Benenson’s perspective generally on emoji and language. He comes out of the tech world, where he’s a bit of a rock star (employee number two at Kickstarter), rather than linguistics. “And I know Fred has created at least one emoji himself that has been adopted by the Unicode Consortium, so it’ll be interesting to get his take on that.”