Superlinguo

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Emoji Deixis: When emoji don’t face the way you want them to

On my train trip home from working in ‘the city’ the other day, I wanted to send my partner a message to that effect. Why send words when you can send the same message in emoji? So I typed [city] [train] [home]:

🌇🚂🏡

Wait. That didn’t work, it looked like I was telling him that I was heading towards the city.

I tried [home] [train] [city]:

🏡🚂🌇

But that also didn’t work. You had to ‘read’ it the opposite direction to written English. English writing and many emoji don’t face the same way.

English has a writing system from left to right. We also tend to conceptualise time as moving from left to right. Even if we don’t say it in words, we’ll gesture events in that order, and even design logos to that effect (see Hillary’s 2016 campaign logo). Deixis is a linguistic term for words that ‘point’ to a particular referent in context - for example, ‘she’ has to be defined as a particular woman, it ‘points’ to a certain person in a context. Deixis is also a features of pointing gestures - the gesture makes no sense unless you know what is being pointed at. Here, the spatial orientation of the train is giving deictic information about the structure of the sentence as it is heading ‘towards’ whatever it is pointing to towards.

Just like in a written sentence, the events in an emoji narrative should generally move left to right. I should start in the city, and move rightwards to home, but the train emoji faces leftwards (i.e. ‘into the past’) and therefore clashes with the expected direction of the narrative.

To send my message I eventually used the facing forward train:

🌇🚊🏡

But it was not as satisfying a narrative as it would have been if the train was wending its way towards my little emoji house.

Almost all non-front-facing transport emoji point leftwards (here’s a sample):

🚂🚜🚒🚗🚐🚤🚝 🚲

It’s the same with animal and people:

🐅🐑🐎🐤🐔🐓🐫🐍🏊🏄🚶🚴🏇🎠🗿📢

In fact, out of the whole set of emoji on my computer, only this handful demonstrated a rightwards bias:

🐌✈️🚀🔉💃🏻🏂💺💤🔜🔙

(I included ‘back’ even though it’s pointing left, because it’s equating left with backwards, which fits the English metaphor of time going rightwards, and left being ‘back’ in the ‘past’.)

Emoji were invented in Japan, and used there for quite a while until they found favour with Western smartphone users as well. Although modern Japanese writing uses a left to right orientation like English, traditional Japanese writing is vertical, and moves right to left. In this system left-facing emoji would be deictically at home. Perhaps this is why we see more left-facing orientation.

The best solution to this deixis dilema would be an orientation-flip option on emoji. In the same way that you can now select a skin-colour, the ability to flip the orientation would make them more useful narrative resources.

Update: Suzy Styles, Japanese speaker and all round smart person, pointed out that emoji direction is probably motivated by Japanese SOV word order. Here are her tweets below! 

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