Investigating the Distinctive Usage of Emoji Between Genders.

Abstract

Emojis are increasingly used nowadays in computer mediated communication and even in daily life. This study investigates genders‘ emoji use in online communication. It aims to explore if emojis can be counted as a language in the near future. For the relevance of the study, fifty participants were selected from Tiaret English department. They were divided according to their gender into two groups. The age varied from seventeen to fifty years old and some were either students and teachers at the same time. The survey was conducted by a quantitative research method in an online survey that we published in an online facebook group. Findings suggested that emoji is widely used and that those pictographs representations are affecting the online written language in terms of grammar and pragmatic functions. In fact, males demonstrated that they have better emoji competence than females do. Results displayed that emoji share many characteristics with natural language. Yet, emoji code surpasses any other outgoing system when it comes to universality and being the ideal communicative system. In other words, re-consideration of emoji system needs more acknowledging in its entire linguistic and social dimensions in order to broaden our awareness.