Emoji is not a Language
What is a language? This is something that is surprisingly controversial. There's some easy ways to tell when something is a language (one of them being that they have an army), but what about things like emoji? Is emoji a language? In this article I will attempt to argue that emoji is not a language unto itself.
At a high level, language is a tool that we use to represent spatial/temporal/conceptual relations between objects/ideas/things, statements about reality and similar things among that nature. Many languages are broken into units of meaning that we call words. Here are some example words:
It's worth noting that not all verbs fall into the "grammar" category. Things like "eat" would fall into a content word, however "is" is a special case because it is directly drawing a relation between two things. In the sentence "The taco is beautiful", there is a relation being made from one specific taco and the abstract concept of beauty.
I want to argue that emoji has plenty of content words, but no grammar words. If we wanted to assemble an analog to "The taco is beautiful" in emoji, we could make 1:1 correlations between English words and emoji like this:
