World Emoji Day Celebrates Popular Symbol Language

ILLUSTRATION - Eine Frau tippt am 24.08.2015 in München (Bayern) auf das Display eines Sm
Matthias Balk/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

A number of events are planned to commemorate World Emoji Day on July 17, a celebration of the symbol-based form of communication.

BBC reports that in celebration of the World Emoji Day on July 17th, the Empire State Building in New York City is set to be illuminated in bright yellow light. This is just one of many planned events for the celebration of the faces and symbols used by many across the world. London’s Royal Opera House plans to translate 20 famous and well-known operas and ballets into emoji form to be displayed on their website.

Social media website Twitter is expected crowdsource ideas for new emojis to add to the 2,666 emojis already featured on the official Unicode Standard list, and #WorldEmojiDay is the number one trending topic worldwide on the social media platform at the time of this writing. Apple also revealed new emojis that would be coming to their operating systems later this year to commemorate the day.

Jeremy Burge, the founder of World Emoji Day and who also sits on one of Unicode’s committees, said that the group processes hundreds of applications and suggestions for new emojis every year, often upsetting companies and brands that attempt to use the smiley face based communication form to advertise their own products.

“You can’t buy your way in – and it makes companies mad,” said Burge. “You need to fulfill criteria. There has to be demand for it. Brands or logos are not permitted.”

Dr. Laura Dominguez, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Southampton, discussed the use of emojis as a form of communication, saying, “I think emojis are OK. Some people don’t like them because they’re not formal. I think they are useful for certain things and sometimes an emoji has more meaning and expression than words. If an emoji can express the same message as you could say with a whole sentence, why not use an emoji?”

But Dominguez was quick to note that emojis are not likely to act as an actual language anytime soon. “The purposes of language are communication and thought,” she said. “You need language to think. Can you think in emojis? I would imagine that even people who use them a lot to communicate probably don’t use them when they are thinking.”

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com

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