The growing popularity of Emoji is brought to the fore today with the celebration of the World Emoji Day. Social media in Nigeria, across Africa and other parts of the world are taking to social media to share the Emoji that best describes them.
Emoji 101
Wikipedia described Emoji as ideograms or smileys originally used in Japanese electronic messages and Web pages. It has however spread beyond Japan.
The original meaning of Emoji is pictograph, the word emoji literally means “picture” (e) + “character” (moji). The characters are used much like ASCII emoticons or kaomoji, but a wider range is provided, and the icons are standardized and built into the handsets.
Some emoji are very specific to Japanese culture, such as a bowing businessman, a face wearing a face mask, a white flower used to denote “brilliant homework,” or a group of emoji representing popular foods: ramen noodles, dango, onigiri, Japanese curry, and sushi.
Although originally only available in Japan, some emoji character sets have been incorporated into Unicode, allowing them to be used elsewhere as well. As a result, emoji have become increasingly popular after their international inclusion in Apple’s iOS in 2011 as the Apple Color Emoji typeface, which was followed by similar adoption by Android and other mobile operating systems.
Apple’s OS X operating system supports emoji as of version 10.7 (Lion). Microsoft added monochrome Unicode emoji coverage to the Segoe UI Symbol system font in Windows 8 and added color emoji in Windows 8.1 via the Segoe UI Emoji font.
With Emoji becoming a global phenomenon, it did not come as a surprise that the inability of available Emoji to describe the ways Africans uniquely feel spurred the introduction of African Emoji which have been described by Huffington Post as ‘adorable and relevant’.
Moving forward, users of Emoji are advocating for more diversity in the Emoji character set. To achieve this, at least for Africa, Oju Africa, an app company based in Mauritius. They launched African emoji that are available for download on Google Play. The app is free, but only compatible with external apps like WhatsApp and Twitter.
Apart from continental interests, users of emoji are demanding that several causes be supported with emoji – causes such as creating identity for homosexuality. Environmental activists also want more outdoor emoji.
With these and several other pertinent present issues having impact on emoji, it is clear that the development and introduction of emoji for every person in any situation and anywhere may not bee realistic but it’s worth trying to please all.
Fun Fact: July 17 was chosen as World Emoji Day because it is famously displayed on the iOS Calendar Emoji, which makes it perfect date for World Emoji Day.
