Are Emojis Ruining Our Language Skills? The Fact

Today the internet world has embraced Emojis and emoticons allowing us to communicate our sentiments, thoughts and feelings with ease. Those Emojis are really attractive and illustrate almost anything from a cute puppy to a screaming monster to a Santa Claus. These Emojis have become so popular among youngsters that these teenagers prefer to exchange their thoughts only through these pictographs.

The reason behind the popularity of these pixelated cousins is they have managed to get over the language barrier, spelling errors, ambiguity of speech and so on. You don’t have to spell out your sentiments, need to know a foreign language to communicate with a foreign person, even need to know how to read.

Emoji experts believe that these Emojis have great potentials. Nowadays they are being used in places like “Username”, “Business cards” etc. They are changing the way people communicate rather giving expression a new direction – linguists say.
But the question is are they good for us? What the fame of these Emojis is doing to our language and expression has become a matter of worry for a large number of linguists including academicians.

Emojis are the advanced version of emoticons. They are images signifying almost anything in the world. They are not only just yellow faces with different emotions but also the face of an animal, a fish, flags of various countries, fruits, a hockey stick, a pair of boxing gloves or skiing shoes, a racing car, a sand clock, a camera, a love sign, an engagement ring, a knife, a bundle of bills with wings and many more. Emoticons, on the other hand, express only emotions with faces.

Emoticons were first created in 1982 by Scott E. Fahlman. He was a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. The purpose was to give an emotional touch to the dry and boring words sent by emails, text messages, chats etc. Computer programmers later on provided with the best-suited emoticons including animated and coloured images. Today the majority of the texting teenagers love to express their thoughts and feelings with these emojis and emoticons. A 2007 report says that almost 80{95bad5d9ca4324ed2f29fbdd69347c14cd6bc60739896fef621b88135d39a486} of Yahoo Messenger users use emoticons in their conversations.

This change in the expression of netizens especially teenagers has affected their command over language, spelling and grammar as well. A recent study reflects that almost half of the British youngsters are least confident with their command over grammar and spelling. Another study shows that they in most cases rely on these emojis and emoticons to express their thoughts or to communicate with each other. They are getting desperate searching for the right emoji that suits best in the emoji box. Sometimes they are using only these emojis without even typing a letter in their messages. Experts are of the opinion that such a tendency will undoubtedly lead them to a state where they are going to suffer from a lack of expression which in turn will tell upon their thinking power and thereby making them less emotional.

On the contrary, another study conducted on the use of emojis today on social media has revealed a different side of the coin. The study reflects that the use of these pictographs varies by social class, gender, age and even geographical location. A certain number of emoticons are very popular among different friend groups, whereas people belonging to different social circles prefer for different emojis and pictographs. Some of them use emoticons with the possible minute detail such as putting a hyphen after a colon to indicate the nose etc. These people have been noticed to spell words correctly and not to use abbreviations in general.

As I said earlier the use of emojis among women is different from that of men. As a common general notion, women are claimed to use more emoticons just for being apparently more emotional. When a message that contains a smiley is received from a sender of unknown gender, the receiver is more likely to assume that the sender is a woman. But the reality portrays a different picture, rather opposite. A study conducted by an online dating site found that men with a smiley in their profiles receive fewer messages than the same done by women in their profiles.

However, this can’t be generalized from an online dating community to the population at large. Social psychologists assert that women are found more comfortable with emojis and use them more frequently than men. In fact, they are found trying to represent the emotions, smiles and nodes that they employ in their face to face conversation through the use of different pictographs.

On the other hand, emojis can also be used ironically among friends to mock, despise or humiliate each other. Yes, emojis vary in their expression across cultures, communities and groups. So be careful next time when you show up with an emoji to your partner belonging to some other culture, group or region.

Needless to say that almost the three fourth of the American population has considered emojis as a part of their professional communication. But experts claim that using emojis might undermine professionalism making a person look less competent. Professionals take the use of smileys for a virtual smile and a digital smiley doesn’t mean that the sender is sending good vibes. At this level, a digital smiley can only be equivalent to a smile when the sender is known to the receiver personally. For professional interactions at an initial level, it is suggested not to use smileys irrespective of age or gender.

Researchers found that the professional emails and messages that did not contain smileys were more detailed and informative.

Today we all know that the Egyptian hieroglyphs have been recently discovered to be approximately 12000 years old. Doesn’t the discussion above indirectly suggest that after 12000 years of technological advancement we, the human civilization is moving back to the modern form of pictograms?

Think of it. Bye for now and have a good time.

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