What's behind Emoji's global success

This week, members of a little-known committee will debate a change to a global language. If all goes to plan, sometime in 2018, we will have a red-headed emoji. Glad tidings for gingers.

Just over 120 years ago, a similar sort of thing happened. An optician called Ludwik Zamenhof proposed reforms to an international language. It went to a vote among a committee but 93 were in favour and 157 were opposed, so Esperanto remained unchanged.

Mr Zamenhof was secretary of the League of Esperantists, the committee debating the changes, and the inventor of Esperanto itself. This year, the language turns 130 years old.

Emoji, as a globally available system, is six years old. And it's trounced Esperanto. Six billion emojis are sent every day.

Emoji has been compared with Esperanto before, and it certainly works across borders and language barriers. I may not know the Indonesian for "a face with tears of joy", but 😂 makes sense to me and someone in Jakarta. That's because, according to University of Michigan researchers, 😂 is the most popular emoji both in the UK and in Indonesia - and for that matter, in the world. (Although not in France, where ❤️️ conquers all.)

But what's remarkable isn't the global nature of Emoji, it's this: Emoji is the most successful planned language in history.

Emoji arose spontaneously, and was offered to customers by Japanese mobile phone operators in 1999. (Emoji are not the same as emoticons, which are text-based.)

They started to spread, until Unicode got involved in 2010. Unicode decides the standards for all sorts of texts in computers - to make sure letters and symbols look at least vaguely similar no matter what you're reading them on. Its Emoji subcommittee asks the public for proposals for new emojis, then decides which to include.

Here, the Esperantophone might object: is Emoji really a language, and is it really universal?

No one actually speaks Emoji. It doesn't have a grammar system. Emoji translations of works like Moby Dick and Alice In Wonderland exist, but only because some people have too much time on their hands. Unicode itself says: "You can probably view (emojis) more like borrowings of foreign words rather than a language by themselves."

Still, a lack of native speakers doesn't necessarily matter. Ancient Greek doesn't have any. And not being a spoken tongue is actually perfect for the internet age, where text on screen dominates.

Emoji definitely has "language-like properties", according Vyvyan Evans, a professor of linguistics at Bangor University. The more it is used, the more it will emerge. You can order a pizza by tweeting 🍕 at Domino's - an interaction that feels a lot like a language. In 2015, a teenager was arrested for making a terrorist threat that was delivered by emoji.

Nor are emojis just icons of existing objects: they develop meaning beyond what they depict. The nail polish emoji 💅 has come to signify a general feeling of fabulousness or ignoring one's haters. In Japan, the bank emoji 🏦 means to avoid responsibilities, because of its similarity to the slang term "bakkureru". And whether you call it an aubergine or an eggplant, 🍆 means 🍆.

That might seem to disprove the second question - whether emoji is truly universal - seeing that different countries have different interpretations of the same emoji. Unicode, again, demurs, giving the example of 💣🐚🎥 to "refer to a bombshell movie" - which would make little sense in Indonesian.

But plenty of phrases don't make sense even to speakers of the same language. Try telling an American "you've got the hump". Likewise, I have no idea what "talking turkey" means, and I don't care enough to Google it.

In fact, this possibility of interpretation is why Emoji is so much more popular than Esperanto, and so much more like a popular language.

Both languages are planned, but they were planned in different ways. Esperanto was set down pretty rigidly: its main development over the years has been neologisms like komputilo (computer) and poŝtelefono (mobile phone). Emojis are strictly policed by the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee - but only in terms of how they're displayed on a device.

People give an emoji meaning. The committee gives us uniform building blocks - then lets us create whatever we want from them. Online, when memes spread in minutes, that's a powerful tool for popularisation.

Emoji might not meet the strict definition of a "universal language". But, even controlled by committee, its flexibility has made it a ubiquitous one.