After reading Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground: From Point to Point, a novel composed entirely of emojis, a question must be raised: Do emojis communicate ideas well enough to be considered a language? In order to answer this question, we have to first examine what the purpose of language is.
A written language only exists so that ideas can be spread more effectively, and have a sense of permanence in the world. Anything written on paper has the same amount of permanence as English does written on paper, so emojis have that box ticked.
Now, do written down emojis spread ideas (and by ideas I mean stories, thoughts, emotions, knowledge, or anything else you might write down) effectively? I think that yes, emojis do convey ideas as well as any other language, emojis are just a language that is more new and less well known than most others. There are no rules of grammar or structure that this language has yet, and I would argue that it actually doesn’t even need those. Regardless emojis were made to be an optical form of communication (that is, read instead of heard), and they can express ideas effectively, so I think emojis are an effective form of language.
From very early in Bing’s Book from the Ground, there are passages that illustrate how well emojis can communicate ideas.
The above passage, on page 4 of Bing’s book, tells us that the main character opened his door, and at his door was a delivery guy who brought him a package. The main character opens the package and finds it is a book that he, presumably, ordered. He begins to read it while drinking his coffee. He gets carried away with the book, loses track of time, and then smells his breakfast burning, so he has to throw it out, but he is still hungry.
These events are all portrayed pretty clearly, and they are all events that we, if we live in the middle class in a first world country, have all experienced. Now, the aspect that sets emojis apart from other languages, is that there is room for you to insert your own imagination into the story. Because there are no rules for the language of emojis, there are certain parts of the story that are left undefined that you, as a reader, are able to expand upon.
For example, you could choose what book he is reading, or you could forget about that detail, and just accept that he is reading a book. You can imagine the conversation and interaction the main character had with the delivery guy. Was the delivery guy polite? Simply neutral? It’s up to you, and you don’t even have to stop to fill in those gaps, you do it automatically while reading and creating the story in your own head.
At least, that’s my theory. That is definitely how it worked for me. One section in which I felt I was able to create some of the emotion and tone behind the narrative was the portion near the end of the above passage. It explained that he was reading and drinking his coffee, and everything was nice and relaxed… AND SUDDENLY HE HAD TO RUSH TO TAKE CARE OF HIS BURNING FOOD. I have been dragged into a story and lost track of time very frequently, so instead of reading an author’s description of how the main character felt, I was able to reimagine my emotions and the feeling of being in that moment. Because of sections throughout the book, I felt that the emojis made Book from the Ground a more immersive book than some others written in English.
There is, of course, an obvious argument to this theory. The argument that, if there are things in the writing left up to interpretation, won’t some of the meaning become lost? Or won’t it be hard to explain exactly what you mean? I definitely agree with this argument, in that the fluidity of meaning from emojis renders them almost useless in certain cases. Emojis would not be effective when, say, writing a constitution for a new country that all sense of justice will be based on in the future. You will need a language more adept at detail than emojis for that (besides, who’s going to take your country seriously if you write your constitution in emojis?).
However, when writing a story, whether fictional or real, emojis are able to immerse the reader and convey feelings in a way that many languages often can not. Also, when writing a story in emojis, if there is something that you want to make 100% sure come across the same to all your readers, you are able to specify your meaning with the large number of options available to you, or even by creating your own emoji! Bring out your inner artist.
So, in conclusion don’t write important historical documents in emojis. But definitely do take a risk, and experiment writing an immersive and relatable story in emojis! Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on emojis and language.
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