Jugendsprachen/Youth Languages

Abstract

This article focuses on the use of emojis by young Danes. We argue that emojis have at least three functions: as a form of guidance to understand posts and avoid misunderstandings (markers of modality and mood), as a form of guidance to help navigation (interactional markers), and as a form of embellishment expressing a sense of fun and feelings (an expressive and aesthetic function). Based on a survey (710 participants including both adolescents (N=297) and adults) and qualitative analyses of naturally occurring emojis on Facebook and Instagram, we found that young Danes aged between 10 and 19 regard emojis as belonging to the domestic/intimate sphere, promoting important features of communication such as emotions, mutual understanding, atmosphere, aesthetics and entertainment. Compared to the answers given by the adults, the young informants perceive emojis as a natural way of showing and expressing their mood, while the adults regard emojis as a secondary language, as compensation for the lack of nonverbal features in written online interaction. 86% of all the informants report that they use emojis at least once a day.

Common Language of New Era in Sport Clubs: Emojis

“…It can be considered that one of the consequences that this effect brings about is the emergence of a new form of written communication belonging to the digital world (Rodrigues et al, 2018). However, the inability of the language used online in this emerging form of communication to convey the desired emotions to the recipient has also led to the need for easier and faster communication (Hougaard & Rathje, 2018;Stark & Crawford, 2015;Zhou et al, 2017). This and similar situations caused users to create messages accompanied by visual and iconic messages, even accompanied by illustrated texts, to convey both emotional and conceptual messages, and thus, in this context, emojis have emerged as a new language in online communication (Gülşen, 2016;Cincu, 2017).…”