by STEPHANIE STUDER
South Koreans use emoji to express playful sentiments they wouldn’t utter aloud
In 1995 Docomo, a Japanese telecoms giant, launched on its pagers the first emoji (“e” for picture, “moji” for written character): a tiny cartoon heart. By the end of the decade the company had developed 170 emoji to use on iMode, the world’s first mobile internet service. To drag a straitjacketed culture of correspondence – with its honorific formulations and layers of formality – into the terse digital world, Docomo’s team borrowed from the visual grammar of manga (comic books) and expressed abstract concepts with visual symbols: a big bead of sweat on a brow to show embarrassment, for example.
It was not until the rise of the smartphone at the end of the first decade of the 21st century that emoji lexicons became available across the world. A library of hundreds of emoji, which include Docomo’s original designs, now appears in keyboards for use on chat apps, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Snapchat. Such is their appeal that Oxford Dictionaries chose last year’s most shared emoji as the first ever pictograph to be awarded “word of the year” (below, or “face with tears of joy”).
But it is still in East Asia that emoji are the most avant-garde. Kim Uryong, a professor of communication at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, says emoji are South Korea’s “third language” (after Korean and English) – worthy, he thinks, of their own dictionary. Around 40m South Koreans (of a total population of 50m) chatter daily on KakaoTalk, a local messaging app; and every month they send 2 billion of the particularly elaborate, character-based emoji known as stickers, from a selection of over 10,000.
Stickers first appeared in East Asia in 2011, developed by KakaoTalk in South Korea, and Line, a Japanese messaging app, which is owned by a subsidiary of Naver, a South Korean internet giant. When a tsunami struck Japan in 2011, Naver’s staff there huddled at the office and created Line in six weeks to communicate with each other across a network with much-reduced bandwidths. James Kim, who managed the design of its first sticker set, says that as the app was developed rapidly, it struggled to transfer photos and videos; when it was released to the public, it compensated for this by offering users large emoji to send each other instead. Moon the rice-cake-shaped man, Cony the rabbit, Brown the bear and vain, blond James (named after Kim himself) were born.
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