Languages fascinate me. Probably because I can only speak one fluently (and a smattering of two others) when there are, amazingly, 6500 different languages in the world.

Linguistics is another specialist field for the Anthropologist, studying how they are formed, how we use them in our everyday lives, and how they shape us. Think “brummy”

Also, an amazing fact, that of the 8 billion of us in the world, 1.5 billion speak English, and 1.4 billion speak Chinese. And yet these are not the two most widely used languages. No….. Emojis are! Apparently, 6 billion emojis are sent every day, and 92 per cent of us with a digital device use them. This is pretty cool when you think about it. There really is a universal language and a way, across this diverse world, that we can communicate. An uplifting thought.

Just a bit of history here. The early emoticons (main picture) were superseded by emojis in Japan in the late 1990’s. To be then taken over by an international body, Unicode in 2010, when the tech companies agreed that a uniform standard would be beneficial. In 2015, skin colour was added, and each year since, further additions have given more personality and cultural meaning to a broader global population. 3600 emojis are in common use today.

Emojis, although sometimes ambiguous, are a quick and expressive way for us to give meaning to our communication. Psychologists also say now that they can be used to assess our personalities. So, bar reams of academic study coming soon, no doubt our emoji use will also form economic data that can be used to sell us something…

I have also seen discussion about whether emojis should be allowed in business emails. To this, I say one thing in my second fluent language…