Emojis: A Grapholinguistic Approach

The present article stands at the interface of CMC research andgrapholinguistics. After outlining which features are typical of the writing of pri­vate text messages, the focus of the first part of the paper (Sections 2 and 3) lieson the use of emojis. Notably, emoji use is not—as is commonly done—analyzedunder a pragmatic perspective, but grapholinguistically, at the graphetic andgraphematic levels: emojis are conceptualized as visual shapes that may assumegraphematic functions within a given writing system. In the second part (Sec­tion 4), it is underlined that all variants of written digital communication (suchas the use of emojis, but also all other characters) are made possible only due tothe Unicode Consortium’s decisions; this, finally, is argued to have far­reaching consequences for the future of writing.