Emoji linguistics
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This document appears to be a slide presentation about language change and the use of emoji. It discusses several universal aspects of language, including that language constantly changes and adapts over time, and that people are good at adapting the linguistic resources available to them. It provides examples of how languages have changed pronunciation or added new meanings to words over time. The presentation suggests that technology like emoji both reflects and accelerates language change as meanings and conventions evolve rapidly online. It emphasizes that language variation helps construct social meaning and that the spread of innovations depends on social networks and issues of power.
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Emoji linguistics
- 1. 👾🐺👻🐙 2️⃣ 0️⃣ 1️⃣ 6️⃣⃣ 🐒🎍 1️⃣ 1️⃣ 📅 0️⃣ 6️⃣ ⏰ 🐣👅🕵🕵🐲💥🕵👓
- 2. • Given at the first ever EmojiCon. • It’s pretty visual, but I’ve tried to give information/context in the notes fields, so you probably should read with those showing. • Unfortunately, you’re going to miss me performing a small section of Beowulf, the Old English epic. Happily, you can hear someone else do some other parts: • Lowkey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zorjJzrrvA • Whoa, not lowkey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzmmPRG4smU (skip the first 28 seconds) • You can check out other things about emoji, politics, data science and linguistics here: • Twitter: @TSchnoebelen • Website: http://www.letslanguage.org • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerschnoebelen Welcome to the slide-ument version of this presentation
- 3. What this talk is about 3 🌍🚀🌌 ♻️🔀🔃 🔧🔩🔨 🌱📈🌳
- 4. What this talk is about 4 🌍🚀🌌 ♻️🔀🔃 🔧🔩🔨 🌱📈🌳 (universals) (change) (adaptation) (growth)
- 5. Universal #1: Language changes 5
- 6. 6 Hwæt?
- 7. 7 😱⁉️
- 8. Sumerian (started ~3500 BC) 8
- 9. Most scripts start out for accounting or administration 9
- 10. Exclamation points don’t get popular on these til the 1970s 10
- 11. 11
- 12. “The iOS 10 emoji are way too lifelike, literal, objectively interpretable, and well, way less weird.” 12
- 13. 13 Universal #2: People are really good at adapting the resources they have available
- 15. Tongan si’i and si’a Different determiners express sympathy to their nouns (Hendrick, 2005)
- 16. Zapotec Voice quality • Falsetto: Respect to godparents, God • Whisper: Important messages • Breathy: Scolding, demanding • Creaky: Commiserating (Sicoli 2009)
- 17. gɪrma kowaji-k ati-e Girma ball-ACC kick-PAST "Girma kicked the ball ' gɪrma-k kowaji-k ati ʃe Girma-ACC ball-ACC kick MAL ‘Girma kicked the ball (although someone else wanted it) ' Malefactives
- 18. 18 🍆🍆
- 19. 19
- 20. Bunny as a reference, sparkles as a feeling 20
- 21. Conventions differ for even close domains 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% Positive Negative Conflict Neutral Restaurants Laptops
- 22. • One Japanese woman who wore a microphone for two years • 13,604 usable utterances • Here we see that breathiness and pitch are controlled separately Individuals vary how they use linguistic resources by who they’re talking to
- 24. 24 What does Drake mean?
- 25. 25 • There are 1️⃣ 1️⃣ ✖️s as many 💀 when people are talking about 📱 Some quick math
- 26. 26
- 27. A quick history of emoji and #blacklivesmatter 27
- 28. 28 People sometimes literally see different things
- 29. How do innovations spread? 29
- 30. 30
- 31. People change throughout their life, but more in “adolescence” (which could just be joining a beer aficionado site well after actual adolescence) 31
- 32. 32
- 33. Imagination—of geography, of gender, of race— structure expectations, interpretations, and choices
- 34. 34 • Languages change: it’s inevitable and desirable • Emoji alert us to the role of technology • (And playfulness) • People adapt the linguistic resources they have • Changing meanings along the way • For their social networks • And possibly beyond • Variation doesn’t just mark a social category • It helps people REFELCT and CONSTRUCT social meaning….and potentially social change • The creation and spread of linguistic innovations involves thinking about power • Who is able to be creative? • Who works with “symbolic capital”? • Local meanings can spread • How connected are people—to what kinds of other people? Quick review
- 35. 35
Editor's Notes
- From the website, here’s the quick description of the talk: True language universals can be hard to find but two of the most solid are (1) languages change and (2) people are really good at adapting to what’s handy. We’ll explore the ways emoji are changing, ways they haven’t, and where to look for hot spots of innovation.
- From the website, here’s the quick description of the talk: True language universals can be hard to find but two of the most solid are (1) languages change and (2) people are really good at adapting to what’s handy. We’ll explore the ways emoji are changing, ways they haven’t, and where to look for hot spots of innovation.
- This an image of the earliest surviving manuscript of Beowulf, around the year 1000. The story dates from the year 800, though. This is also that part where I do quick ten second performance from the middle of the poem to illustrate how the only possible word modern audiences might guess in a first hearing is “Cain” (of Biblical fame). You might be able to puzzle through Chaucer’s Middle English, but it’s clear lots of things have shifted in the language since 1000 AD.
- That’s the first word in Beowulf—it turns into our ‘what’ through sound changes AND semantic changes. Back then it was more like, ‘listen’, ‘lo’, ‘hark’, ‘now’, or ‘indeed’. But see http://www.isle-linguistics.org/resources/walkden2011.pdf for more examples/details of how to understand it as an exclamative.
- (‘What’ in emoji)
- Emoji alert us to the technology of language (writing and ITS technologies). Writing itself has only been invented about five times—most writing systems come from some group looking at their neighbors and saying, “That writing thing is a good idea.” And adapting or adopting what their neighbors are doing. Sumerian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_tablet
- Most scripts start out for accounting or administration The oldest language in the world, Sumerian, started for keeping brief records of tax payments or distributions of rations Here’s the basic order of what you do when you get a writing system: * Commercial, legal, contracts, some magical and religious uses * Chronicles and ritual texts are later * Instruction and entertainment later still You might as an exercise take emoji for a spin: contract taxes chronicle religious text education poem https://books.google.com/books?id=tVcdNRvwoDkC&pg=PA50&lpg=PA50&dq=sumerian+%22word+order%22+earliest+writing&source=bl&ots=Ae9hyEH_9C&sig=PDUs3_caK46Scvj4aJxqZObz4OI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEYQ6AEwB2oVChMIjf_Et7WGyQIVD5mICh0MGwDj#v=onepage&q=sumerian%20%22word%20order%22%20earliest%20writing&f=false
- No exclamation point on typewriters in the 1950s, not really popular til the 1970s But the exclamation point had been around for a long time before. So we can think of their absence on typewriters as indicators of what sort of things WEREN’T getting typed up. If you think of business uses, you end up in formal areas where expressive marks like ! are going to be rare (even today).
- The first emoji were 12x12 pixels on Japanese phones (Docomo put them out into the world first) http://blog.kotemaru.org/old/2010/08/08.html
- Here you can see that emoji are still evolving—often with criticism. The way of the world is change, especially in language/communication. So part of this presentation is about challenging Zoe’s belief that Apple’s changes will ruin things. (What we should appreciate is that they will change them.)
- Language change creates language variation and language variation creates language change. Here’s a thing to think about: people are structured by big social forces and technologies (structure), but they also create and adapt those structures (agency). In this slide, you basically see the use of the past to get a particular effect (comically old fashioned superhero-speak).
- In the next few slides, I show how people take other linguistic resources and give them meaning or change their meaning. Diphthongs are characteristic of spoken Czech in Prague, it can also be used to convey or intensify pejorative or affectionate meanings
- A determiner is something like “the”
- People use these resources in lots of places—”creaky” is what people sometimes call “vocal fry” (usually to criticize the way young American women speak because people often criticize women. And younger generations.) Here are some in Zapotec—Mexico—that are conventionalized in interesting ways.
- During my last stay with speakers of Shabo, I learned they had a malefactive particle (well, “particle” is a bit of a question mark right now) allowing speakers to describe situations in which someone does something nasty. For linguists: Note that the agent of the malefactive sentence (Girma) is marked with the suffix of the accusative. In the absence of malefactive, the agent is not marked. This gives us the impression (and there’s other evidence) that –k is more than a simple accusative case marker.
- Obviously the most-easily identifiable “people adapting this” emoji is the Eggplant.
- The peach, too, has been adapted—to mean Georgian pride (since Georgia is associated with peaches). And to mean butt/booty/ass. You can see it in the curvature of most of the peaches. Apple is changing their peach to get rid of the butt-cheeks, but I believe there’s reason to believe that people will still keep using the emoji this way for a while, potentially a long while. Iconicity can get things started but then they can keep going long after the obvious connections are gone.
- Here, the point is that emoji can get employed for all kinds of things: here the bunny means “you, the receiver, affectionately identified as a rabbit”. The reaction of getting hugs and hards and bunnified is a big smile and sparkles-as-an-expression-of-feelings. And of course, he also puts in the bed, to communicate something like “It’s 11:30pm! I’m headed to bed, happy!” Emoji are often used as responses just to close out communication, so this one also accounts for “you won’t hear more from me til morning”. But again, the point is: people adapt the emoji to turn humans into rabbits or bears or tigers or foxes. And they express feelings using more than just facial expressions.
- If you’re writing reviews, you might think you use the same kinds of things for both restaurants and laptops. Obviously, people talk about laptops as being reliable/unreliable and restaurants as being delicious/disgusting and not the reverse…but the are also just factors like “people writing laptop reviews are just a lot less positive than people writing restaurant reviews”. All things being equal, you’ll use different kinds of emoji for different kinds of domains. This reflects what kind of domain you’re in and some conventional meanings of the emoji, but it also SHAPES and CREATES these meanings. From SemEval 2014 http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/S/S14/S14-2.pdf
- The point here is that individuals vary their use of linguistic resources by who they are talking to. Linguistic resources like breathiness, pitch, and emoji help you know what kind of relationship you’re in…they also help create that relationship. (Try speaking in monotone with a romantic partner and never say anything like “I love you”. What happens?) Campbell (2004) looks at voice quality ("laryngeal phonation style"). In particular, the data here is a Japanese speaker who work a microphone for two years--the usable portion of this was 13,604 utterances. (Cool!) The first thing is breathiness. She’s most breathy with non-family/friends. This seems to be part of politeness. Median values of Normalized Amplitude Quotient and F0, z-scored scaled so the units are in SD with 0 as the mean of the distribution (Campbell 2004: 1). Higher NAQ values are breathier. The second graph is pitch—she speaks in a higher pitch with children (which is what a lot of people do). See also Campbell & Mokhtari (2003).
- BK in Japan reminds people of “bakkureru”, a slang term for evading one’s responsibilities. Cultural—or subcultural—contexts shape what we see, how we use and interpret things.
- He said praying. But there are big fights in America about whether it’s high-five or praying. Originally, it’s hands folded as in Japanese bowing for pleading or thanking. Things change. None of these answers is “right”. (“Okay, Tyler, then I want to say it means ‘The king of France is bald’…no, things can’t mean ANYTHING, there are limits...if you could get enough people to treat that as the meaning, though, sure, okay, that’s no longer wrong.)
- Go to the next slide!
- We’ve known about the skull in portraiture as the momento mori—a symbol of mortality, death. People use it with their mobile phones because: Their phone is ‘dry’ (no text messages) Their battery is dying/dead A parent took their phone away In other words, they are saying, “I am socially dead!”
- If we look back several years ago to when both #icantbreathe and #blacklivesmatter were trending we find far fewer of those tweets have emoji than normal. That’s not surprising. These are serious subjects and emoji are largely playful and cartoonish. To the extent that they WERE use, the ones that were used were fists and hearts. BUT the fists had an extra level of strangeness—back then, 2014—people could only use a whiteish/yellowish fist, which doesn’t convey any relationship to the historical Black Power fists of solidarity. Now, people can use other skin tones but they still don’t do it all that much. In this screenshot, you see three little fists—those aren’t emoji, Twitter puts those in whenever you use #blacklivesmatter, presumably as visual interest. (This, in turn, may discourage people from adding even more of their own.)
- As we saw with peaches, different devices do show different things. The woman-in-a-red-dress-tangoing on Apple was a guy-in-a-white-leisure-suit-discoing on Android for a long time. These create dialects BUT they also reflect dialects. Who gets which phone and what platforms people use are not separate from things like social class, race, ethnicity, country-of-origin, etc.
- Rickford and Price look at two women over time. Here’s a slide comparing them as girls to other young people. http://www.academia.edu/download/31508377/Rickford_and_Price_2013__Girlz_II_Women-Age_grading__lg_chg__and_stylistic_variation.pdf This graph is about dropping is/are in African American Vernacular English (the most studied language variety in sociolinguistics). What you want to pay attention to gender and social class.
- Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and colleagues look at how people learn to become participants/connoisseurs on beer rating sites. You join as newbies (you don’t know the vocab), then go through an “adolescence” where you use A LOT of the jargon, then as you go on, you use jargon (you know it) but you don’t use it as much (perhaps less necessary to prove your belonging). In the graph on this slide, we show how people do get attached to things that they encounter during formative periods. https://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/irwin.king/_media/presentations/linguistic_change_lifecycle.pdf
- From Jacob Eisenstein and colleagues, tracking the spread of terms, 2009-2012 on Twitter. The point here is the geography matters…and so does race/ethnicity/urbanness (see quotes below). ion = i don’t -_- = annoyance ctfu = cracking the fuck up af = as fuck ikr = i know right ard = affirmative, alright Some key quotes: “while language change does spread geographically, demographics play a central role, and nearby cities may remain linguistically distinct if they differ demographically, particularly in terms of race.” “larger cities are more likely to transmit to smaller ones.” “Wealthier and younger cities are also significantly more likely to lead than to follow. While this may seem to conflict with earlier findings that language change often originates from the working class, wealthy cities must be differentiated from wealthy individuals: wealthy cities may indeed be the home to the upwardly-mobile working class that Labov associates with linguistic creativity [58], even if they also host a greater-than-average number of very wealthy individuals.” http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0113114
- Imagination of social categories are powerful. That is: there are notions about what people and places are like. This includes others and self, in-group and out-group.
- Symbolic capital points us to the fact that not everyone has access to normal-kinds-of-capital.
- Check out http://carlagannis.com/blog/prints/gardenofemojidelights/ People see different things in emoji. Exposure within your social network is part of this, as well as notions of people not in your social network. Among the exciting things to look at in emoji are interpretive strategies, the ways meaning develop and spread. It is not surprising that emoji change over time, nor that people adapt them. This leads to opportunities for studying social categories AND ranges of social meaning, how they connect, spread, and change.