A New Form of Language: The Story of Emoji
Some time ago, the average person would have found it difficult to envision a world where you could simply send a small image when talking to someone, and that would be considered an appropriate response.
But today, emoji are a ubiquitous part of communication, and, many would say, a new form of language.
The first emoji were created in 1999 by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita, who was working for mobile network DOCOMO. He was asked to design a set of emoji that could be used when the company launched its mobile internet system, i-mode, on which messages were limited to 250 characters.
"We thought emoji would be a quick and easy way for them to communicate," he told The Guardian in 2016.
At the time, people were already using "emoticons" in their conversations. These are basic expressions made using characters on a keyboard. For example, a colon and a right parenthesis — :) — will give you a basic smiley face.
Kurita took this concept and developed it further into a set of 176 black-and-white pixel images to convey things like emotions, weather and food. The set is now part of the permanent collection at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Speaking with The Guardian, Kurita said he was inspired by marks used in weather forecasts, as well as Chinese characters. In fact, the word "emoji" is a compound word, where e is Japanese for "picture," and moji means "character."
"I didn't assume that emoji would ... become so popular internationally," Kurita said.
But they did — and it didn't take long. Rival companies in Japan soon started using emoji themselves, and by the mid-2000s, international companies like Apple started incorporating them into their systems.
In 2010, emoji were officially recognized by the Unicode Consortium, an organization that maintains text standards in software. This meant emoji could be accessed on any operating system.
Today, Unicode has approved over 3,700 emoji, representing different moods, animals, food, flags and more. And just like any other language, it continues to evolve, with new ones added annually.
