NOTE: This dissertation was presented in partial fulfillment of my M.A Journalism and Mass Communication. This dissertation is not peer-reviewed; therefore the findings of this paper are not the final conclusion.
Introduction
The practice of using emojis has evolved over time and has led researchers to the question:
Can emojis be a language?!
Some parts of this question have been answered. The popular novel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville was translated into emojis but the larger audience opined that it simply did not work (I guess we can picture why). Leaving linguists torn over this subject.
The topic of emojis as a language is well-studied in the linguistics and communications field. When emojis first came into the digital world, in the year 1999, they used to understand emotions and gestures. Since then, emojis have spread into several fields - advertising, animation, movies, health care, and customer ratings, among others.
In the year 2015, the laughing emoji was recognised by the Oxford Dictionary as ‘Word of the Year.’ Recognizing an emoji as a word has far more implications than we can imagine. In the same year, a large volume of research papers were published regarding the same.
After the labourious task of reading several research papers, we know a few standard, general knowledge pointers:
Emojis rely on English for their translation. This is because emojis are standardised by the Unicode Consortium.
Emojis and their meaning change from one context to another.
The use of emojis depends on the culture.
Emojis are dependent on ideologies. Ideologies are the meanings we assign to things and language is full of ideologies.
With all that being said, I thought to myself:
Can emojis be used as a language in real life conversations?
My research guide, Mr. Mark Rasquinha concluded there was only one way to find out - AN EXPERIMENT!
So, I went around asking people if they wanted to be part of a really cool experiment. And much to my surprise. They said, yes.
How the experiments were conducted
I gathered participants who were part of the digital natives, that is, the millennials and Gen Z. (Digital natives belong to the generation that grew up with the internet and technology. They are comfortable using technology, and is second nature to them).
I created three WhatsApp groups and decided to put a bunch of strangers together to see how they texted and used emojis.

Some cool/creepy things I did during the experiment:
Watched people text each other for 90 days - with the help of virtual ethnography, a data collection method, I watched the participants as they texted each other.
Played emoji games - to get the best out of the participants.
Had fun!
Findings
There were three things that were noticed:

Participants used emojis at the end of the sentence to create emphasis.
Participants replaced words with emojis.
The dumb charades game - to see how people arranged emojis to create meaning
Game of charades
There was something interesting about the way participants interpreted the emojis and got the right answer.

A simple decoding of the emojis showed us an underlying power structure to emojis:

There's a power struggle between two languages. English - is dominant and has direct translations for emojis and regional languages like Hindi that has to deal with the dominating language. But, in these situations, the emojis make sense in regional languages - resistance the dominance.
The Bigger Picture
The struggle between a standard language, English, and a regional is always going to exist. It exists everywhere you see it. It exists in the schools we studied in, in our workplace, in meetings, in the language we use to text in, and in every other place we can possibly imagine. This power structure cannot be defeated. What can be done is to be aware of it and how it dominates us and our thinking.
Where do emojis come into this picture? They are one of the doors to understanding this phenomenon. As technology moves into virtual reality and augmented reality, this power structure will continue to exist.
Emojis are a metaphorical door to understanding the ideologies behind the power structure that exists between a standard language like English and other regional languages that we regularly use.
A thank you note
A special thanks to all the participants who took out time to be a part of this experience. This project was highly praised by the professors at St. Joseph’s University.
You have played a special role in making a small scratch on the surface of the incredibly vast field of linguistics. Researching emojis as language power structure is relatively novice and has a large scope.
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