The Swadesh list is a classic set of 100 vocabulary items that are collected by linguists in different languages to compare the similarities and differences of those languages. The Swadesh list is by no means perfect, but it’s a generally recognised set of basic vocabulary. For different languages you may find that there’s one of two things that don’t quite work, maybe there aren’t many animals with horns, or maybe there are several different words that are used for ‘all’.

So what happens when you try and do a Swadesh list of emoji?

Well, if you needed even more proof that emoji aren’t language, here it is.

Firstly, I was relatively fussy, but not too fussy. Some are great, some are not. For things like ‘bark (of a tree)’ I could have just put tree up again, but the part-whole relationship gets difficult. Colours are there, but on particular objects. There are also very few emoji of people just standing, full-bodied?

And verbs… well verbs are tough. Adjectives are difficult as well, because they’re pretty abstract until applied to something (we know what a ‘good dog’ is, but what’s a ‘good’?). Pronouns are a challenge for emoji because they require context for ‘me’ to mean the particular person speaking at the time, very easy to do with language, difficult to do with emoji.

Emoji updates might fill a few gaps. You might also think I missed some things? If so, you can leave a comment on the Google Sheet I used to make the list (bit.ly/emoji-swadesh).