Signs of the times

The Delhi college-goer is careful when it comes to the hearts on her phone. There are 20-odd hearts on the palette, including a black one, one that beats and another that comes neatly bow-wrapped. “The red heart is too passionate,” Anamya Anurag says.

The pink one with the sparkles, on the other hand, works for most occasions. It’s casual and unlikely to be misinterpreted, she points out. That’s the 20-year-old philosophy student’s choice emoji for her text messages. “When you really don’t want to reply, like when your parents send ‘Good morning’ texts, you respond with a sparkly heart, an affectionate emoji,” she says.

Touted as the fastest growing language of communication, emoji — or picture character — has grown complex and extensive in recent years. A few weeks ago, Unicode Consortium, a California-based non-profit that develops, maintains and promotes software standards, released 59 new emoji and 171 new variants to the existing ones.

A total of 230 icons will be out this year. Among the new ones are the much-talked of period emoji (a red droplet) and a motif for the hearing impaired. There is also a new emoji for a sari, a diya and a temple, all of which will be available on major platforms in the course of the year.

CREDIT: PARTHA PRATIM SHARMA

The emoji has long graduated from the customary happy and sad face to a laundry list of emotions, attitudes and things. In the process, it has effortlessly nudged out words from virtual communication. Anamya and her friends speckle their online messages with emojis. So do older folks, albeit to a lesser extent.

Humankind is perched on the early stages of visual literacy, a phenomenon happening across the world, states critic and cultural activist GN Devy. “It is a process of evolution where we’ve found a suppler medium for transmitting messages,” says Devy, the architect of the People’s Linguistic Survey of India.

Like everything else in the modern times, the emoji has its champions and detractors. It cannot be denied that the symbols facilitate communication and conversation. Want to express grief over a death? Opt for the teary face. Congratulate someone? Click on the bottle of champagne or fireworks. The painting nails emoji is just the apt answer to queries on plans for the evening. The green face means nausea; a hand, respect or a high-five.

“A barrier in texting is the inability to show emotions. Emojis let you do that. You are interpreted exactly the way you want to be interpreted,” Anamya says. She has her set of go-to emojis. Words of apology pale against the puppy dog image — a yellow face with furrowed brows and pleading eyes. If she is deep in thought, there is the face with the thumb and index finger on the chin. “It is a crystal clear language for those who use it,” she says.

But what’s communication for a generation can be a befuddling cloud to another. A journalist laughs that her mother often uses the symbol of a middle finger — an impolite gesture — in place of the index finger, and no one dares to tell her what it really means.

Likewise, Anamya’s mother, Abhaya Srivastava, says she is clued up on the simpler emojis, but is lost when they grow intricate. “I rather type out the message than sit and search for the right emoji. But the kids think differently, they click on the emoji and work is done,” she says.

Srivastava recalls how puzzled she was when she came across an emoji — a face with two dots — that she couldn’t decipher. “The kids told me it’s the speechless emoji. I may end up using a lot of it in my texts to them,” she chuckles.

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But those are the hurdles that are not difficult to overcome. What worries a section of experts is the future of the written word. As the new visual language takes over informal communication, where does it leave the written text? A recent WhatsApp forward juxtaposed ancient cave paintings with the emoji, indicating a return to the pre-letter era. In his 2015 piece in The Guardian , writer Jonathan Jones rued man’s return to the dark ages and called the emoji a step back for humankind.

ILLUSTRATION: DIPANKAR

“After millennia of painful improvement, from illiteracy to Shakespeare and beyond, humanity is rushing to throw it all away. We’re heading back to ancient Egyptian times, next stop the stone age, with a big yellow smiley grin on our faces,” he warned.

Those alarm bells have fallen on deaf ears. Lately, emoji as a communication tool has grown in might and influence. The Japanese term ‘emoji’ stands for a picture character and is slightly different from ‘emoticons’ which largely depict facial expressions and postures. Ever since Shigetaka Kurita, the 25-year-old Japanese inventor, came out with his set of 176 emoji, in 1998, it has fattened into a language with 3,000-odd characters. That would make the emoji — if recognised as a language — one with the largest number of characters. And it continues to grow.

The emoji has also been evolving, in tune with social and cultural demands. For instance, hands and faces now come in a range of skin tones. And they are getting increasingly local. Deepak John Matthew, head of the design department at IIT-Hyderabad, guided two of his researchers from coastal Karnataka as they worked to create emoji with local quirks for an in-house project.

“In the long run, emoji will get extremely personalised,” says Matthew. “You can now send a brown coloured thumbs up. In the years to come, the emoji will be further customised to your regional and cultural requirements. Customers might like that. If you are from North India, your emoji panel will be related to your place,” he adds. Design prototypes earlier worked to create a model that was typical. The focus now is on the individual, he says. “The effort is to create you — exactly you,” Matthew says.

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What’s worrying educators, though, is the increasing propensity among youngsters to use signs instead of words. Language experts fear the trend may leave youngsters with poorer writing skills. Patralekha Ghosh, a Kolkata-based retired English teacher, says she has observed a steady decline in the spelling and grammar skills of students.

“Emoji has affected the students’ confidence in dealing with the written language. While an emoji makes communication easier, it is ruining the student’s grasp of English. They are now relying on the emoji to do the job of words,” says Ghosh, who also teaches spoken English.

The habits of virtual conversations, she says, are seeping into serious writing exercises. It is not uncommon to find students ending a sentence with a smiley instead of a stop mark. She recalls how her colleague, while evaluating Std X board exam papers, came across an answer where each paragraph began with an emoji.

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The dependence on technology, she adds, is also making students lazy. “Mastery over the language is no longer a requisite when one can communicate through an emoji. It is a step backwards,” she insists. As a spoken English teacher, Ghosh also notices among her students disinclination towards long verbal communication. Formal interactions tend to be brief and are often supplemented with gestures. “I often find them trying to emote the word, just like an emoji,” she says.

But that is one side of the story. Aneesha Dutta, a middle school English teacher in the Capital, states that while pictorial aids might interfere with a child’s ability to deeply engage with words, they also help a student understand concepts better.

For a generation raised on images, with early access to television, computer, tablets and smartphones, communication is naturally driven by graphics. “Their concentration levels are low. Just words do not engage them; images keep them focused,” says Dutta. The popularity of graphic novels — a genre that blends text and image — marks the change.

Dutta is not averse to using pictures or signs to enhance learning, though she uses emoji judiciously in her class presentations. “These allow students to understand a concept better. For instance, if I’m teaching them synonyms of hot, I can reel out many words. But if I show an emoji or an image of the bright sun, they get the concept instantly.”

An emoji, Dutta agrees, may be a shortcut. “But isn’t that the idea? To make things simpler rather than complex,” she asks. “Words sometimes fail to convey an idea in its totality. Emojis remove the ambiguity,” she notes.

The icon has certainly enlivened communication by creating space for feelings and emotions, points out Smita Joseph, sociolinguist at Hyderabad-based the English and Foreign Languages University. It has done so by replacing a word altogether, or coexisting with it. “The number of words we use has shrunk. We are in the process of doing away with the word,” she holds.

Dutta believes that an emoji will eventually coexist with text. “We can’t expect language to be constant. If emoji helps language evolve, why not?” she asks. She is geared up for the emoji book, an idea that may not be long into the future.

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In 2015, The Guardian newspaper used only emojis while tweeting then US President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. Then, Australian politician Julie Bishop caused a stir when she answered questions posed by a newspaper with emojis (for Vladimir Putin, for instance, she placed an angry face).

But those are exceptions. “It is highly unlikely that you will use an emoji in a formal mail, but in casual modes such as WhatsApp or Facebook. The use of the emoji is definitely governed by style,” says Joseph.

Its application is governed by the relationship between the sender and the recipient. A junior employee is unlikely to use an emoji in a text or mail to a senior. “But if you’re communicating with someone younger, you might put in an emoji. I’m less likely to use an emoji in a mail to my boss, but my senior may use it to address us in a semi formal mail,” she notes.

The expert believes the emoji is however helping people communicate better. The evolving emoji, for now, stands in for emotions, leaving the linguistic part of communication to the word. “We still do not use an emoji to convey information. This makes our communication system work on dual modes — the written and the visual,” says Joseph. As a result, communication has become more complex. “It might make us lazy, but more expressive,” she adds. As of now the emoji has no place in the academic circles. Joseph, for instance, will never use one in an academic paper. “It will undermine my status as a researcher.” However, over the years, literature — African-American works for instance — has closely reflected the nuances of language in specific cultural contexts. As the emoji becomes popular culture, will it enter textbooks? “It might, if a student-friendly curriculum is the focus,” says Joseph.

The icon has opened a new world for those who cannot express themselves in languages such as English. Maryam, a 22-year-old domestic help in Delhi, studied only till Std V, but texts and WhatsApps, using emoji. “How r u Anty” is her occasional emoji-filled message to a former employer.

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It might be a small icon, but language scholar Devy does not underestimate the emoji’s part in the evolution of humankind. The emoji will bring about change because it will, over time, affect brain function. Visual modes, he points out, work on a different part of the brain. “Analysis of sound, on which language is based, is done by Broca’s area (a region in the frontal lobe), while visual signs are processed through the pre-frontal cortex. The process of interpretation of the visual and the oral is different,” he explains.

The change is teasing the human brain, urging it to pick a visual to interpret a word. The first casualty of such a change is the grammatically structured language. “Written language is a standardised form of the spoken language. It reduces all diversity into a single, dominant and acceptable form,” Devy says.

The standardisation has left multitudes outside its ambit. The emoji can be interpreted as a rebellion against the tyranny of grammar, syntax and standardisation and the exclusion it has fostered, he argues.

The movement towards the visual is spurred also by the human desire for silence. Widespread urbanisation and noisier habitats have placed a premium on quietude. “Humans are tired of sound bites. Soundless spaces are a prospering industry; hence a silent airport or restaurant comes at a price,” says the Padmashri recipient.

It will, of course, take a while for the visual imagery to take root. Devy points out that the first printed newspapers bore letters in large fonts to handhold a newly-literate community into reading. Likewise, the new visual language, as seen in the early emoji, is expressed in simple, sharp colours and clear signs. “If the new visual mode was a fine combination of colours like a (Vincent) van Gogh painting, people will fail to interpret them,” he points out.

Where does that leave the written word? Will it disappear as the emoji evolves and spreads across mediums? Devy addresses the query from a different perspective.

Human communication, he points out, is 500,000 years old. The history of human language goes back 70,000-odd years; that of writing, 6,000 years. Printing has been known to Europe for over 400 years.

“Language existed without writing for 60,000-odd years and writing for mass communication makes for only 400 of the 70,000 years of language. Writing is a method of communication, it is language technology. Technology in itself is not language,” he argues.

But the written word, he maintains, will not vanish. It will remain a part of one’s irreversible habit — just like body gestures and tonality of speech. “There is a word lurking behind every emoji,” Devy says. “Only, it is in the shadows.”

P Anima

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