Giannoulis Elena Wilde Lukas Ra Ed Emoticons Kaomoji and Emo

 

 Emoticons, Kaomoji,  and Emoji Emoticons,

This collection offers a comprehensive treatment of emoticons, kaomoji kaomoji  , and emoji, examining these digital pictograms and ideograms from a range of perspectives to comprehend their increasing role in the transformation of communication in the digital age. Featuring a detailed introduction and eleven contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, the volume begins by outlining the history and development of the field, situating emoticons, kaomoji kaomoji ,  and emoji—expressing a variety of moods and emotionalboth states, facial as well allwithin kinds of everyday objects—as a topic of expressions, global relevance but as also multimodal, semiotic, picture theoretical, cultural and linguistic lingu istic research. The book shows how the interplay of these systems with text can alter and shape the meaning and content of messaging and examines how this manifests itself through different lenses, including the communicative, sociopolitical, aesthetic, and cross-cultural. Making the case for further study on emoticons, kaomoji kaomoji ,  and emoji and their impact on digital communication, this book is key reading for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, media studies, Japanese studies, and language and communication. Elena Giannoulis  is Junior Professor for Japanese Literature at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at Freie Universität

Berlin, Germany. Lukas R.A. Wilde is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute of

Media Studies of the University of Tuebingen, Germany. Germany.

 

Routledge  Routledge Research in Language and Communication

The Role of Language in the Climate Change Debate

Edited by Kjersti Fløttum Multimodality, Poetry and Poetics

Richard Andrews The Language of Money

Proverbs and Practices Annabelle Mooney The Pragmatics of Text Messaging

Making Meaning in Messages Michelle A. McSweeney Multiliteracies, Emerging Media, and College Writing Instruction

Santosh Khadka Emoticons, Kaomoji Emoticons,  Kaomoji ,  and Emoji

The Transformation Transformation of Communication in the Digital Age Edited by Elena Giannoulis and Lukas R.A. Wilde

 

Emoticons,  E moticons, Kaomoji , and Emoji The Transformation of Communication in the Digital Age Edited by Elena Giannoulis and Lukas R.A. Wilde

 

 FFirst irst published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business  business   © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Elena Giannoulis and Lukas R.A. Wilde to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Tr ademark notice n otice :  Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data  Data  Names: Giannoulis, Elena, editor. | Wilde, Lukas R A, editor. Title: Emoticons, kaomoji, and emoji : the transformation of communication in the digital age / edited by Elena El ena Giannoulis, Lukas R. A. Wilde. Description: 1. | New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge Research in Language and Communication ; 6 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This collection offers a comprehensive treatment of emoticons, kaomoji, and emoji, examining these digital pictograms and ideograms from a range of perspectives to comprehend their increasing role in the transformation of communication in the digital age. Featuring a detailed introduction and eleven contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, the volume begins by outlining the history and development of the field, situating emoticons, kaomoji, and emoji – expressing a variety of moods and emotional states, facial expressions, as well as all kinds of everyday objects– as both a topic of global relevance but also within multimodal, semiotic, picture theoretical, cultural and linguistic research. The book shows how the interplay of these systems with text can alter and shape the meaning and content of messaging and examines how this manifests itself through different lenses, including the communicative, socio-political, aesthetic, and cross-cultural. Making the case for further study on emoticons, kaomoji, and emoji and their impact i mpact on digital communication, this book is key reading for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, media studies, Japanese studies, and language and communication”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019021405 | ISBN 9781138589 9781138589261 261 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429491757 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Emojis. | Emoticons. | Symbolism in communication. | Interpersonal communication. | Communication—Technological innovations. Classification: LCC P99.63 .E46 2019 | DDC 004.601/48—dc23 LC record available at  at https://lccn.loc.gov/201902 https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021405 1405   ISBN: 978-1-138-58926-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-49175-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

 

Contents

List  L ist of Contributors  Kaomoji,, and Emoji: The Transformation   1 Emoticons, Emoticons, Kaomoji of Communication in the Digital Age

vii

1

 E LENA GIANNOULIS, FREIE UNIV ERSITÄT BERLIN, ELENA GERMANY,, AND LUKAS R.A. WILDE, UNIVERSI TY OF GERMANY TUEBINGEN, GERMANY

PART I

Intercultural Mediations

23

  2 Not Everyone s: Or, the Question of Emoji as ‘Universal’ Expression

25

 JO  J   O N AT ATH H A N E . A B E L , P E N N S Y LVAN I A S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y, U S A

3 Cultural Literacy Literacy in the Empire of Emoji Signs: Signs: Who Is ?

44

 A LISA FREEDMAN, UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, USA ALISA

4 Emoticons: Digital Digital Lingua  Lingua Franca or Franca or a Culture-Specific Product Leading to Misunderstandings?

67

 M ARZENA KARPINSKA, UNI VERSITY OF TOKYO, JAPAN; PAULA MARZENA KURZAWSKA, KURZA WSKA, FREIE UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN, GERMANY GERMANY;; AND KATARZYNA ROZANSKA, REPUBLIC OF KOREA

PART II

Intersectional Mediations

83

  5 ‘Impact taisetsu da!’ : The Use of Emoji and Kaomoji and Kaomoji in  in ō Escort Blogs Between Gender Expression and  Dans Emotional Labor

 M ARTA FANASCA, UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER, UK MARTA

85

 

vi vi   Contents   6 Emoticons in Social Social Media: The Case of Japanese Facebook Users

104

 M ICHAELA OBERWINKLER, UNIVERSITY OF MICHAELA TUEBINGEN, GERMANY

PART III

Linguistic Mediations

125

  7 ‘Iconographetic Communication’ in Digital Media: Emoji in WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook— From a Linguistic Perspective

127

 C HRISTINA MARGRIT SIEVER, UNIVERSITY OF ZÜRICH, CHRISTINA SWITZERLAND

 Kaomoji,, Emoji, 8 A Cultural Exploration of the Use of of Kaomoji and Kig  and  Kig ō in Japanese Blog-Post Narratives

148

 B ARRY KAV BARRY KAVANAGH , TOH OKU U NIVER SITY, JAPAN

PART IV

Pictorial Mediations

169

  9 The Elephant in the Room of Emoji Research: Research: Or Or,, Pictoriality, to what Extent?

171

 L UKAS R.A. WILDE, UNIV ERSITY OF TUEBINGEN, GERMANY LUKAS

10 Construction of Iconicity in Scenes Scenes of of Kaomoji  Kaomoji  

197

 R ISA MATSUDA, UNIVERSITY OF TSUKUBA, JAPAN RISA

PART V

Material Mediations

209

 11 Who Is Afraid of Mr. 11 Mr. Yuk? Yuk? The Display of the Basic Emotion of Disgust in an ‘Analogue Precursor’ to Contemporary Emoji

211

 A LEXANDER CHRISTIAN, GERMANY ALEXANDER

12 From Digital to Analog: Analog: Kaomoji  Kaomoji on  on the Votive Votive Tablets of an Anime Pilgrimage

227

 D ALE K. ANDREWS, TOHOKU GAKUIN UNIVERSITY, JAPAN DALE

Index

247   247

 

Contributors   Contributors

   Jonathan E. Abel Prof. Dr. Dr. Jonathan E. Abel is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Japanese Studies at the Pennsylvania State University Universi ty,, USA. His Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transfer Transfer  Japan (University  Japan  (University of California Press, Pres s, 2012) won the Weatherhe Weatherhead ad Asia Institute First Book Prize. His current project considers the mass marketing of new media as world-transf world-transforming orming against the reverse mimesis at work within those very media. Dale K. Andrews Prof. Dr. Dale K. Andrews graduated from Southern

Illinois University, Carbondale, USA, with a degree in Anthropology (1996). He then entered graduate school at T ōhoku University (Sendai,  Japan), receivi receiving ng a PhD in Religious Studies (2007). Presentl Presentlyy, he is employed as an Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Culture, Faculty of Liberal Arts at Tōhoku Gakuin University (Sendai, Japan). His main field of research is Japanese folklore, specifically folk belief. He has researched shamanism, supernatural retribution, household relations, and rural politics. In 2007 he stumbled across the emerging phenomenon of anime pilgrimages and became be came intrigued by the intersection of ‘digital and analog worlds’, where popular culture merges with folk traditions. His academic affiliations include the American Folklore Society, Society, Anthropology of Japan in Japan, the Association for Indology and the Study of Religion (board of directors), the Folklore Society of Japan, the Folklore Society of Tōhoku (board of executive directors), and the Japanese Association for Religious Studies (body of councilors).

Alexander Christian Dr  Dr.. Alexander Christian was awarded both his MA

and his PhD in Communication Studies by the University of DuisburgEssen, Germany. He has also studied Film, Television, and English in Duisburg-Essen, the Ruhr University Bochum, and the Universidad de Málaga. His dissertation Piktogramme: Tendenzen in der Gestaltung und im Einsatz grafischer Symbole ( Symbole (Pictograms: Pictograms: Tendencies Tendencies in Design and Use of that Graphical Symbols von Halem, 2017) the causes requireSymbols  changes;  Herbert in the designs and uses of investigates pictograms

 

viii viii   Contributors and explores the question of how the understanding and the effectiveness of pictograms can be improved by adding features of nonverbal communication such as gestures, facial expressions, or posture. In his preceding thesis, Piktogramme: Kritischer Beitrag zu einer Begriffsbestimmung  (Pictograms: Critical Contribution to a Definition  Definition ; Shaker,, 2009) he already developed a critical conception Shaker conc eption of pictograms and traced their semiotic framework. Alexander Christian now heads the Presswhere and Public at Stadtmarketing Herne GmbH, he hasRelations launched Department a new ‘city brand’. Marta Fanasca Marta Fanasca obtained her PhD in Japanese Studies from

the University of Manchester Man chester,, UK. Her PhD research focuses on femalefe maleto-male crossdresser escorts known as dansō and on how they perform masculinity and on the emotional labor they perform in meetings with customers. She applied ethnographic approaches and methodologies to semistructured interviews and observations and spent nine months in Japan working as a crossdresser escort herself. An article in which she presents the findings of her research was published in Orizzonti  giapponesi: Ricerche, idee, idee , prospettive ( prospettive ( Japanese  Japanese Horizons: Research, Ideas, Perspectives  Perspectives;  Aracne Editrice, 2018). In addition, Marta Fanasca is also interested in contemporary Japanese visual arts and has published two articles about the contemporary artists Yamamoto Takato and Matsui Fuyuko. Alisa Freedman Prof. Dr. Alisa Freedman is a Professor of Japanese Lit-

erature, Cultural Studies, and Gender at the University of Oregon, USA. Her current research explores issues concerning globalization, gender,, and urbanization in 20th- and 21st-century Japanese literature gender lite rature and popular culture. Her major publications include Tokyo in i n Transit:  Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road  (Stanford  (Stanford University Press, 2010), an annotated translation of Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (University Asakusa (University of California Press, 2005), a coedited volume on Modern GirlsPress, o n the2013), on Go: Gender Gen Mobility,40-chapter and Labortextbook in Japan  Japan   (Stanford University andder, a ,coedited on Introducing Japanese Popular Culture (Routledge, Culture (Routledge, 2017). She has published refereed articles and book chapters on Japanese modernism, urban studies, youth culture, media discourses about gender roles, television history, humor as social critique, and intersections of literature and digital media, as well as translations of Japanese novels and short stories. Elena Giannoulis Prof. Dr. Elena Giannoulis studied Japanese Studies and Literary Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and Keiō 

University, Japan. In September 2009, she received her PhD in Japanese Studies. Currently, she is a Junior Professor of Japanese Literature at the Institute of Japanese Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

 

Contributors ix Furthermore, she is the principal investigator of the research project “Emotional Machines: The Technological Technological Transformation of Intimacy in Japan” (2017–2022), funded by the European Research Council. In addition, she is a translator of Japanese literature. Her fields of interest include modern and contemporary Japanese literature and culture, affective sciences, self-narratives and translation theory. In 2011, she received a postdoctoral fellowship in the Humanities in the US, awardedpostdoctoral by the Volkswagen Volkswagen Foundation. Moreover,, sheGraduate Moreover obtained a two-year fellowship at the Interdisciplinary School “Languages of Emotion” where she did research on ‘coolness’ and other forms of affect control. Currently, she is working on her second book, which focuses on the depiction of emotions in modern and contemporary Japanese literature. Her first book, published in 2010, deals with the notion of ‘authenticity’ in contemporary Japanese literary self-narratives. Marzena Karpinska Marzena Karpinska is currently pursuing her PhD in

Sociolin guistics at the University of Tokyo, Sociolinguistics Tokyo, Japan, in the Department Departme nt of Language and Information Sciences. She received her Master’s degree in Japanese Studies S tudies from the University of Warsaw Warsaw,, Poland, and in Linguistics from the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. She was awarded a fully funded research period at the University of Foreign Studies in Tokyo, as well as three consecutive MEXT Scholarships at the University of Tokyo. Currently, she is doing research on the role of visual cues in speech perception. Barry Kavanagh Dr. Barry Kavanagh is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Excellence in Higher Education at Tōhoku University in

 Japan. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the Graduate School of International Cultural Studies at Tōhoku University. His principal research interests lie in the areas of Japanese Japane se and Western Western online computer-mediated communication and sociolinguistics. His recent publications include Use of Unconventional Means of Communication in Japanese and“The American Blog Comments,” in Typological Studies on Languages in Thailand and Japan  Japan ,  edited by Tadao Miyamoto, Naoyuki Ono, Kingkarn Thepkanjana, and Satoshi Uehara, 173–195 (Hitsuji shobō, 2012) and a paper titled “Emoticons as a Medium for Channeling Politeness within American and Japanese Online Blogging Communities”, in Language and Communication 48 Communication 48 (2016): 53–65. Paula Kurzawska Paula Kurzawska is a Master’s student in Japanese StudStu d-

ies at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She received her Bachelor’s degree in German-Japanese Studies from the University of Leeds, UK. She carried out a period of research at the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. Currently,, she is researching the status of the TOEIC exam in Japanese Currently society.

 

x  Contributors  Risa Matsuda Risa Matsuda is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School Risa of Humanities’ Social Science Faculty of the University of Tsukuba,  Japan. Her research focuses on French in computer-mediated computer-mediated communication. She holds a Bachelor of Literature from Meiji University in Tokyo (2014) and a Master’s Master’s degree in Linguistics from the Graduate School of Humanities’ Social Science Faculty of the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Her latest publications include “About the Phenomenon of Creativity in the Newlanguage”, Forms of Abbreviation French:Linguistics Morphological Analysis of SMS in Bulletin ofinFrench and Literature of University of Tsukuba 31 Tsukuba 31 (2016): 15–24, and with Yang He, Kaori Tsuda, Riko Mizuochi, and an d Tsuyoshi Tsuyoshi Kida, Kida , “Linguistic “Linguist ic Strategies in Case of Emergency: François Hollande’s Speech During the Terrorist Attacks on Paris and ‘Charlie Hebdo’”, in Bulletin of French Linguistics and Literature of the University of Tsukuba  Tsukuba   31 (2016): 114–136. Michaela Oberwinkler  Dr. Michaela Oberwinkler is a Postdoctoral

Research Associate at the Institute of Japanese Studies at Tuebingen University, Germany. From 2006 to 2009, she was the director of the Tuebingen Center for Japanese Studies at Dōshisha University in Kyoto, and in 2003, she was a research fellow at the German Institute of Japanese Studies in Tokyo. She studied Japanese Studies, Chinese Studies, Linguistics, and German as a Foreign Language in Bonn, Tokyo (Keiō University), and Taipei (National Chengchi University). She holds a PhD in Japanese Studies Studie s from Tuebinge Tuebingenn University (2006). Her major publications include Neue Sprachtendenzen im japanischen Internet: Eine Soziolinguistische Untersuchung am Beispiel von Tagebuch-Mailmagazinen   (New Tendencies in the Japanese Language on buch-Mailmagazinen the Internet: Analyzing Japanese Internet Diaries  Diaries ;  TOBIAS-lib, 2006) and “The Language of Otaku: Analyzing the Japanese Internet Story ‘Train ‘T rain Man’”, in in Japan  Japan and Japanese People: Views from a Transcultural Perspective  Perspective,  edited by Osamu Hattori, Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo, and Martina Ebi, 59–72 (LIT (LIT,, 2010). Katarzyna Rozanska Katarzyna Rozanska translates contemporary literature from Korean. She graduated with Honors from the University of Warsaw Warsaw,, Poland, in the Faculty of Japanese Studies (2010) and is a recipient of numerous grants, such as a MEXT Scholarship in Japanese Studies, a Korean Government Scholarship, and a Korean Literature Translation Institute grant for the translation of literary works. She was also awarded with 14th LTI Korea Translation Award for the translation, into Polish, of Yi Mun-yol’s Mun-yol’s Our Twisted Hero  Hero.  Her main research interest focuses on Japan-Korea literary exchanges, transcultural studies, and literary translation studies. Christina Margrit Siever Dr  Dr.. Christina Margrit Siever S iever is currently curren tly research-

ing communication with emoji emo ji in the project “What’s up, Switzerland?”

 

Contributors xi (www.whatsup-switzerland.ch   www.whatsup-switzerland.ch)—more  )—more specifically—in the subproject B (“Language Design in WhatsApp: Icono/Graphy”). Prior to this she was a research fellow in the module “Public and Private Communication in the New Media” of the project “Language as a Social and Cultural Practice” of the Swiss National Science Foundation. She wrote her PhD thesis about multimodal communication on the social web. Her research interests lie in the fields of media linguistics, multimodality,, language teaching, and dialectology ity dialectology.. Lukas R.A. Wilde Dr. Lukas R.A. Wilde studied Theater and Media,  Japanese,  Japan ese, and Phil Philosoph osophyy at the Fried Friedrichrich-Alexa Alexander-Unive nder-University rsity in Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, Germany, and the Gakugei University of Tokyo,  Japan. He is a fellow of the German Academic Scholarshi Scholarshipp Foundation. His media studies dissertation on the functions of ‘characters’ (kyara (kyara  ) within everyday communication of contemporary Japanese society was awarded the Roland-Faelske-Award for the best Dissertation in Comics and Animation Studies in 2018. He is working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Media Studies of the University of Tuebingen, Germany. Germany. His main areas of interest are visual communication, picture and media theory, comic book theory and narratology. He is treasurer of the German Society for Comic Studies (ComFor), spokesperson of the Committee for Comic Studies (AG Comicforschung) of the German Society of Media Studies (GfM), and co-organizer of the digital artists’ initiative Comic Solidarity Solida rity..

 

1

Emoticons, K  Kaomoji aomoji ,  ,  and Emoj Emojii The Transformation of Communicationn in the Communicatio Digital Age Elena Giannoulis and Lukas R.A. Wilde

Emoji,  E moji, emoticons, and kaomoji kaomoji play  play an important role in everyday communication using devices such as smartphones, tablets, or notebooks.  notebooks.1    Although we use them frequently in chats c hats and in social media, or for this very reason, we might not think deeply about how they change our comc ommunication. Often, these small and colorful ideograms and pictograms are used in a playful and entertaining way way.. They help us to add a certain ‘tone’ to the written word, to express irony, irony, to emphasize or to neutralize a message. They can round off communication and give the written word a soft or gentle touch. Sometimes they merely visualize what was said directly before. Without realizing it, we have become addicted to using them and have started to expect a laughing emoji at the end of a chat in order to feel comfortable. When emoji are not even used once, we might feel that the sender is somehow cold, distant, and impolite or we might ask ourselves if the communication went smoothly or not. Is the written word no longer sufficient? What do digital ideograms and pictograms add to communication? When did we start to use emoji, emoticons, or kaomoji ,  and why? How do we define them, and how can we distinguish kaomoji them from one another? In what ways, and in which contexts, do we use them and when exactly? Moreover, nowadays emoji are, primarily, not only a part of digital communication but have also found their way into social debates, economy, art, and even literature. Surprisingly, research has not paid much attention to them so far. far. The present volume is the first interdisciplinary and transcultural attempt to reflect systematically on the impact of emoji, emoticons, and kaomoji .  It attempts to connect reflections on the communicative, semikaomoji otic, sociopolitical, and aesthetic transformations of the global cultural landscape via these ideograms and pictograms. Are they, as it is often stated, a global language? That is to say, are they a chance to communicate across cultures, or are they early indicators of a decline and degeneration of (written) language? What potential do they have and where are the limits of their success story?

 

2  Elena Giannoulis and Lukas R.A. Wilde  A Short Survey on the State of Emoji, Emoticon, and Kaomoji Research

As has been retold countless times by now, the ‘face with tears of joy’ emoji was chosen as the “Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015”. Paradoxically enough, it is precisely not  a  a word. Emoji are digital pictograms or ideograms encoded encode d in Unicode, the standard by which computers represent text. The Unicode codepoint for the ‘face of tears with joy’ is U+1F602, which software on computers and phones can render or ‘translate’ into preconstructed and largely standardized pictorial characters. Like all its ‘digital colleagues’ within the rapidly evolving repertoire of emoji characters, the ‘face with tears tea rs of joy’ will look slightly different on various platforms and operating systems (WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter use different sets of emoji, as do Apple, Google, or Microsoft) while at the same time conforming to a given Unicode description. Bethany Berard, in her comprehensive overview on the production of emoji, finds that “[e]moji are thus ‘codified’ in both a technical and a social sense as both the technical code point of the characters is standardized, while the designation of an official name codifies a dominant or traditional reading and an implied correct usage” (Berard ( Berard 2018, 2018, n.pag.). Popular online articles on “12 commonly misunderstood emojis” (Beall 2016) 2016 ) nevertheless attest the enormous potential for emoji-misunderstandings and diverging “cultural codings” (Danesi (Danesi 2017, 2017, 31). To To date, the Unicode Standard 11.0 (in effect since May 21, 2018) contains a repertoire of 2,528 emoji characters. If Unicode characters that serve as components to emoji, for example, skin modified variants, are counted, c ounted, the total number of emoji is 2,789. For Unicode 12.0 a number of 236 new emoji were included as candidates, out of which 61 have been accepted. They were released on March 5, 2019.  2019.2   On average, we see the addition of 60 new ones per year, year, and so far not no t a single one has been removed from the repertoire. 3   Although—or maybe precisely because ertoire. because —emoji  —emoji are not ‘words’ in any strict sense, it has been argued that they have the potential to make language barriers increasingly obsolete. In a recent monograph on emoji, for instance, linguist and communication scholar Vyvyan Evans opens the discussion with the statement that “[e]moji is, today, today, incontrovertibly the world’s first truly universal form of communication” (Evans (Evans 2017, 2017, 20). Note that Evans deliberately uses the term communication communication instead  instead of language language ,  clarifying even before that “[e]moji is not a language in the way that, say, English, French or Japanese are languages” (19). While this difference may be small but crucial, it remains a fact that scarcely a day passes without emoji being discussed as a new ‘universal language’ in one journalistic article or the other. The organizers of the Emoji Art and Design Show, arranged by New York City‘s Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, famously coined the term of a “new visual vernacular” as early as 2013.  2013.4   

 

Emoticons, Kaomoji , , and Emoji 3  FFor or some, that is a reason to celebrate; for others, a sign of decay, of the loss of the importance of ‘actual’ language. Predigital predecessors, such as ‘stick-figure faces’ made up of punctuation marks and letters, have been in existence since the second half of the 19th century. century. When the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, gave a speech in 1862, the audience’s response was recorded by the typesetters as “(applause and laughter ;)” (Evans (Evans 2017, 2017, 150). Although this was certainly a marginal phenomenon back thoseindays, similar forms ofas facial representations have been used everinsince handwriting, as well in print, to humorously enrich texts by adding emotional nuances through nonverbal communication. In 1963, stick-figure faces were rediscovered and transformed when the U.S. American commercial artist Harvey Ball designed the first ‘smiley’. The invention of digital  emoticons  emoticons is attributed to Scott E. Fahlman who used :-) and :-( in a discussion forum at Carnegie Mellon University in 1982 (see Fahlman 1982). 1982). The term emoticon  is composed of emoticon is emotion and emotion  and icon icon and  and can be understood as a representation of a facial expression composed entirely of regular ASCII characters, a standard set of digital codes representing letters and symbols (‘American Standard Code for Information Interchange’). Emoticons could quickly be found in Instant Messaging (IM), chats, social networking services (SNS), Short Message Service (SM) textemails, messages, or blogs. The most commonly used emoticons, the ‘smileys’, have since become an integral part of digital communication. A distinct Japanese form of emoticons, particularly open for creative expression, is called kaomoji kaomoji  , 顔文字 (facial characters). Regular emoticons are horizontally oriented and usually do not rely on more than four ASCII characters, while kaomoji  are oriented vertically and kaomoji are sometimes created from 20 characters or more. In contrast to ‘Western’ emoticons where most attention is paid to representing the mouth, the most important part of kaomoji kaomoji are  are the eyes. A typical example would be (＾▽   ＾   )  as an expression for ‘joy’, or (>_