Emoji is the new English?

Undeniably, the evolution of language is a natural process to occur. Interestingly, the advent of technology, specifically the social media networks has brought about immensely unprecedented evolutions in language, therefore paving ways for languages, in this context English to revolutionize more than ever expected. In recent years, English, as the most dominant language in the world, has become fragilely susceptible to the emergence of various trends in social media. And, as known to many, one of the ubiquitous evolutions is the immense use of emoji as part of the communicative elements in English. Let's talk about history. Before the birth of emoji, people around the globe were introduced with the use of emoticons, the ancestor of emoji. Emoticon basically is the combination of numbers, punctuation marks and letters which are used to represent facial expressions that portray a person's emotion as well as sentiment. To exemplify, this emoticon of :-) illustrates smiling or the feeling of happiness, while this emoticon of :-Ο means surprised. Such pictorial representations of emotion were widely used by the Net users in online chatting and other digital texting platforms including text messaging during the 1990's and early 2000's. As revolution took place, emoticons evolved from being monochromatic and visually simple, to a more graphical and expressive version, known as emoji. This word of emoji in actuality is the combination of two Japanese words "picture" and "letter". Its creation is credited to the work by Shigetaka Kurita who designed the emoji to be used in a keyboard when typing on mobile phones developed by NTT Docomo, a Japanese mobile phone company. Since then, emoji has become a must-have feature for every smartphone keyboard around the globe. Not just for texting purposes, emoji nowadays are apparent even on almost every video conferencing platform, including Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, as well as social media platforms. The list of emoji has expanded from the basic emotion representations since its beginning to even culture-related and event-specific emoji to be chosen from, which is claimed to be more than 3000 of them. And, of course, it is among the most to-go languages by digital citizens (especially among the Gen Z's), to the point that emoji was once regarded as the third most utilised language in the world, right after English and Mandarin.