emoji inventor
The oldest record of written English, discovered in a small village in England, is on the back of a brooch that dates back to the mid-seventh century. Spanish, a bit younger, finds its earliest written language in brief notes scrawled in the margins of an 11th-century monastic text. Among the oldest recorded written languages, Ancient Egyptian glyphs can be traced back to prehistoric pottery and tablets.
And in the late 1990s, an employee at a Japanese telecom company designed the minimalist cartoon images that were to become what we now know as emojis.
To be fair, emoji isn’t quite the same as English, Spanish and Ancient Egyptian. Those languages had phonetic elements so they could be spoken, and they were bound to a specific people or geographic location. Emojis, on the other hand, have no verbal equivalents. They’re worldwide, used by people of every race, religion and creed.
But emoji is no less a language than the abovementioned three. Emojis convey meaning — albeit unspecific meaning, but meaning nevertheless — translating to tangible thoughts and concepts. And, as evidenced by Apple’s release Wednesday of an emoji keyboard that includes multiethnic and same-sex couples, emoji even grows and adapts over time, just as any other living language does.
So how did emojis come about?
In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita, an employee working at Japanese mobile service provider NTT DoCoMo, designed the first emojis on a 12-by-12 pixel grid using pencil and paper. Ranging from faces to hands to music notes to exclamation points, the first emojis were inspired by pictograms and Japanese Manga comics.
It’s not completely clear why Kurita actually created his emojis. Accounts vary: The first emojis may have been designed to fit on NTT DoCoMo’s small, 48-character phone screens, or as a way to limit messages’ bandwidth or possibly as an appeal to teenagers. Like most languages, the origin of emojis is somewhat muddled by the murk of time.
Whatever the reason, emojis quickly became popular in Japan, and the crude little characters were adopted by other Japanese telecoms.
Emoji’s Japanese origin helps explain some of the stranger characters. In Japan, poo is commonly associated with good luck because in Kanji, the words for “poo” and “good luck” are very similar. Hence, the poo emoji. As another example, there are two camel emojis because the Japanese word for a camel with one hump is different than the word for a two-humped camel.
So they remained primarily in Japan until 2011. That’s when Apple globalized the characters by including an emoji keyboard in the iPhone’s iOS5 update, and they spread from phone to phone like wildfire.
Once emoji was translated into Unicode, a programming language that allows communication between different operating systems, they became compatible across brand names. Linked by Unicode, companies can each design their own versions of the emoji keyboard, which explains why emojis look different on an iPhone versus on an Android.
Emoji is continually expanding, with new and updated characters being introduced every few years. The Unicode Consortium, a U.S.-based nonprofit responsible for developing and maintaining Unicode, actually accepts applications for new emojis, though characters must already be in widespread use to be considered.
Clearly, emoji will never be considered as serious a language as English or Spanish. However, its rapid rise in use and popularity dwarfs many of these so-called serious languages.
So rather than compare emoji to English or Spanish, maybe Ancient Egyptian is a better comparison. Who knows? Maybe, once we go the way of the Ancient Egyptians, emojis will be the entirety of what our culture leaves behind.
Wouldn’t that be ironic?
