From a humble smiley face with a box mouth and inverted \u201cV\u2019s\u201d for eyes, crude weather symbols, and a rudimentary heart \u2014 emoji have now exploded into the world\u2019s fastest-growing language.<\/p>\n
\nThere are now about 1,800 emoji characters \u2014 and counting. They cover everything from emotions and food to professions, are racially diverse and have become an integral part of the smartphone age.<\/p>\n
The digital hieroglyphics are regarded as so significant that New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art, which is home to works by Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, is exhibiting the original 176 designs.<\/p>\n
Shigetaka Kurita, the man who created these characters, is still surprised by the success of his idea, but says he was meeting an obvious need.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t only Japanese who felt inconvenienced when they were exchanging text messages. We were all feeling the same thing,\u201d he tells AFP.<\/p>\n
Kurita was working at major telecom NTT Docomo in 1999 when he sketched out one of the first emoji, a clunky looking thing barely recognisable as the precursor to today\u2019s yellow smiley face.<\/p>\n
Kurita was also experimenting with how to make information, such as weather forecasts, more accessible on the small screens of emerging cellphones, deciding visual aids would help. The sun and umbrella symbols \u2014 both open and closed \u2014 were among his earliest creations.<\/p>\n
For inspiration, Kurita says he tapped Japan\u2019s popular manga comics and the country\u2019s complicated writing system that uses two sets of phonetic letters mixed with Chinese characters, known as kanji.<\/p>\n
Keenly aware of how text messages could be misconstrued, he wanted to create visual accompaniments to help articulate tone.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith a heart, the message can\u2019t be negative whatever the text says,\u201d Kurita explains, describing his motivation to include the sign.<\/p>\n
This month Kurita is going to New York to visit the exhibition honouring his creation, whose name is a combination of the Japanese words for pictures and letters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese 12 x 12 pixel humble masterpieces of design planted the seeds for the explosive growth of a new visual language,\u201d Paul Galloway, a design collection specialist at the museum, wrote on its website.<\/p>\n
Among Kurita\u2019s ideas for original emoji was a pile of faeces.<\/p>\n
\u201cI made poo. It\u2019s childish but I thought it\u2019s good to have something that makes people chuckle,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe company turned it down for the sake of its corporate image.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, a smiley-faced poop is one of the world\u2019s most popular emoji, though according to the emojitracker website, a face with tears of joy is the symbol that is used the most.<\/p>\n
Despite being popular in Japan around the turn of the century, it took another decade for emoji to really take off globally.<\/p>\n
Their success is in part due to the soaring popularity of smartphones, which has resulted in a jump in mobile messaging.<\/p>\n
Around 2010, a consortium of tech firms adopted a standardised table so emoji could be used across different platforms. Subsequently they became available on the iPhone and there was no turning back.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re now found in every type of online communication, whether it\u2019s tennis star Roger Federer using them to announce his comeback from an injury or Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop sending an angry red face to describe Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n
Reality star Kim Kardashian, who has 88.9 million followers on Instagram alone, developed her own range of \u201cKimoji\u201d symbols. There are also apps for users to create their own, personalised emoji and avatars.<\/p>\n
It is estimated emojis are used by 92 percent of the \u201conline population\u201d, according to the 2015 Emoji Report, released by a digital marketing firm. In the same period the Oxford Dictionary chose an emoji as its word of the year.<\/p>\n
This month, a London translation agency said it was advertising for its first \u201cemoji translator\u201d to help meet the \u201cchallenges posed by the world\u2019s fastest-growing language\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have turned a corner in writing, whereby phonetic script and visual symbols are being integrated more and more,\u201d said University of Toronto anthropology professor Marcel Danesi, author of \u201cThe Semiotics of Emoji: the rise of visual language in the age of the internet\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn some ways, (emoji) have rendered communication much more fluid and effective.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kurita wonders what emoji will look like in 50 or 100 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think they will disappear and a heart symbol will always be a heart, but I wonder how others will turn out,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Kurita, now a board member at internet services firm Dwango, didn\u2019t get direct financial rewards for his creation.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it\u2019s more than enough compensation to have the honour of them being added to MoMA\u2019s collection and going down in history.\u201d\u2014AFP<\/em><\/p>\n Image: Alamy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From a humble smiley face with a box mouth and inverted \u201cV\u2019s\u201d for eyes, crude weather symbols, and a rudimentary heart \u2014 emoji have now exploded into the world\u2019s fastest-growing language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1708,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1707"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1707\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}