why do we use emojis?

Emojis are those small icons—smiley faces, winking eyes, hearts of all shapes, sizes and colors—that we use in text messages, emails and social media. They are everywhere these days because they increase the precision and nuance of our often super-brief and open-to-misunderstanding communications. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

Emojis are not labeled, so their meaning is up to those who use them. But because they often telegraph an easily identified thought or feeling, they are mostly understood in context. They help us to add tone and clarity to our communication.Those colorful symbols are everywhere these days, even as decoration in high-fashion collections and, very soon, in movies. Yes, emojis have left the digital realm and are firmly entrenched in today’s wider popular culture.

At the same time, those little smiling faces have changed the way we communicate.The world can sigh with relief - a set of 72 new emojis is coming soon, among which are the (much needed) avocado, selfie and face palm. New additions to the Unicode Standard - the character coding system that supports emoji rendering on different platforms - always generate a surge of joy on social media. It seems that we can never get enough of those funny icons.

And the latest research shows that the appeal of emojis goes well beyond younger users alone - in fact, more than 80% of adults in the UK now use them in their text messages, while a whopping 40% admit to having created a message composed entirely of emojis.

So, given their even wider spread adoption, are we now talking about a new form of language?

Some argue so - language comes in many forms, and one of these can be the use of visual symbols. Indeed, today’s writing systems evolved from early symbol languages, which resemble emojis, and its no accident that the emoji homeland is Japan, a country with complex writing script and a “very visual” culture, as sociologist John Clammer puts it.

But will emojis take us back to the preliterate times of cave drawings? It’s true that they convey meaning on their own - after all, the 2015 Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year wasn't a word, but a pictograph.