Today the most common way to communicate with other human beings is to interact with them through some language. But with over 7 billion people in this world and over 7000 different spoken languages around (Ethnologue count them to 7,099), how many languages do you need to learn to communicate your feelings and emotions to any random person you encounter? Some might be thinking that a sign language or perhaps a braille code is a universal language. But this one is a misconception among most people (including me). No, they ain't universal. Ethnologue lists 137 types of sign languages in use in different regions of the world. So what could be that single string which can bind us all?
I feel it's going to be emojis. Although many would say that emojis are not actually a complete language, it's evolving quite fast. In just two decades of its invention by Japanese, emojis have become popular all over the world. Yes, they can't be spoken but are being widely used in digital and visual communications. Presently emojis can not replace a full language but it do spice up the language lot better than mere words. Most people use them as an enriching supplement to their language which can convey their emotions & reactions much more effectively with just some hieroglyphs. Due to its increasing popularity, an effort was made in the year 2010 to make emojis standardized by the Universal Consortium. Not only that, last year they have also proposed a draft to provide the user the ability to customize their emojis according to their need like changing the gender of the emoji, hair colour or direction of the image.
That's why I say emojis are on their way to evolving into a full-fledged language ...a more unifying and inclusive universal language. Did you know that in 2015, when Oxford Dictionary declared the Word of the Year, people were pleasantly surprised to learn that it was not actually a word ...but an emoji. This is the beginning of exciting times for emojis.
Several people have experimented relying entirely on emoji exchanges for their communication needs for 24 hours. And if you find it intriguing, meet Alex & Liza, a couple who communicated just through emojis for a whole month. I think efforts like these would certainly help evolve emojis into the first Universal language which everyone of us can understand. The importance of an universal language for humans can be understood by the experiences of Mr. Charles Bliss, an Austrian Jew, who was forced to flee Nazi occupation and found himself in China. The difficulty to communicate with people in an entirely different language inspired him to create a language which could be understood by all of humanity. The symbols he created are called Bliss Symbols which were created long before the smart phone era and can be called a precursor to today's emojis.
Today, we are moving closer to realize his dream. These days at many places you can expect a pizza to be delivered to you by just tweeting an emoji of pizza. International chains like Domino's and Starbucks are experimenting with their "Tweet-to-Order" emojis. Emojis are becoming so versatile that a search engine called emoji2video was created especially to search youtube videos using only emojis. PornHub provides a service where you can text an emoji to order free videos. You can also read Bible with the help of emojis here,
To transcend the linguistic, cultural and literary boundaries, we need to use more and more emojis in our posts, chats, texts and emails. And what could be better than beginning it on a World Emoji Day which falls this Monday viz. 17th July, 2017? Do learn more about the many interesting facts and news related to emojis on the World Emoji Day website or Emojipedia
I've noticed here on this platform, many people don't even know the method to insert an emoji into their posts. Unfortunately, Steemit text editor does not include an emoji keyboard yet. But this should not deter us from using emojis here. It's very easy to insert emojis into your posts, post-titles or comments by just selecting and copy-pasting the emoticons from any other place. If you are still wondering, I'd recommend you to go to iEmoji website where you can click any emoji and then select it from the box, and copy-paste it. Yeah, it's that simple! You may also like to bookmark this cheat sheet for easier copy-pasting. Personally, I find Get Emoji website more handy. If you want to increase the size of emojis in the posts, you can use h1, h2, h3 etc. tags too. And for frequently used emoji, you can avoid copy-pasting by typing the Decimal Code for those emojis, if you can memorize those. I memorize only the last 3 digits of some popular emojis and prefix them with € then those 3 digits and finally with a semi-colon ; and it reveals as the emoji. For a quick cheat sheet of all these codes, refer to Steemit Guide.
So keep enhancing your expression power with the help of emojis. And don't forget to vote for your favourite emoji at World Emoji Awards to be announced on this World Emoji Day. 😊
Happy Emojing toall Steemians here!