Are emoji a language? No.

✍️😁🕐👇🗣️🌍❓❓❌❌

Can emoji be made into a language? Yes.

✍️😁🕐👇💪💪🐛🦋➡️➡️🗣️🌍❓❓✅✅

The Emoji Language is a constructed language created by Santa Monica based musician and linguist Ryan Zin. It is a purely written language that puts order to the more than 3,500 available emoji, and allows them to be used to express any concept in detail, or translate any text. It is designed to be as easy to learn as possible without sacrificing nuance or finer meaning. 

The grammar of The Emoji Language is incredibly simple. It takes influence from a number of major world languages, most notably English, Spanish and Mandarin, but also from notable constructed languages such as Toki Pona which seek to simplify communication to its bare essentials. 

The order in which words appear in a sentence is fundamental to the grammar of The Emoji Language. Word order is so important because there are no conjugations or case markings, there are no articles (words like “a” and “the”), no word that means “to be,” and there is no difference between singular and plural nouns. This simplicity makes forming sentences a breeze. The word order is always the same. All sentences start with a noun or pronoun, then a tense marker, then a verb, and finally any nouns that are affected by the verb, or that give any additional context to the sentence. Although it may seem limiting, this rigidity keeps The Emoji Language easy to understand, and is made up for by its extremely colorful yet intuitive vocabulary. 

A word in The Emoji Language is always made up of two emoji. This removes any ambiguity of when one word ends and another begins, and lets the language be written without spaces between words. Each word means exactly what its constituent emoji depict. For example 🏠🏠 means “house,” and 🍎🍎 means “apple.” Two different emoji can also be combined to create more complex words. For instance, 🌳🌳 “tree” and 🍎🍎 “apple” could be combined to create 🌳🍎 “apple tree.” In this instance, 🌳 comes before 🍎 because “apple tree” falls into the broader category of “trees.” Many emoji also have strong meanings associated to them through popular culture. These meanings are retained in the emoji language as well as the immediate visual interpretation. The best example of this is 🍆🍆  which could mean “eggplant,” in the context of cooking, or something more suggestive in another context. Homonyms of this type are common across spoken languages, so it doesn’t make sense for The Emoji Language to be any different.

Another thing that makes learning lots of vocabulary is that nouns and verbs are written exactly the same way. They are only differentiated by their function within a sentence. For example, 🚗🚗 can mean “car,” or “to drive” depending on its context. 

There are about 75 grammatical words that are best memorized in order to be completely fluent. These include the tense marker words which are made with 🕐 + another emoji, and prepositions and conjunctions which are made mostly using combinations of the various arrow emoji. Although these words represent abstract concepts, they are still easy to remember. For instance the words for “and,” “but,” and “or” are ➕➡️, ➖➡️, and ⚖️➡️ respectively. 

One last major category of words are descriptors;  adjectives and adverbs. These words are formed using an emoji + 💛. This is rather arbitrary, but 💛signifies that the descriptor word means a notable attribute of the first emoji. Adjectives and adverbs are written identically just as nouns and verbs are, but they are differentiated by their context. Adjectives always follow nouns, and adverbs always follow verbs. For example, 🐆💛 (cheetah + 💛) means “fast,” or “quickly,” depending on it’s context. That means that 🚗🚗🐆💛 can mean both “fast car,” or “to drive quickly,” depending on its context. 

The simplicity, and visual nature of the vocabulary means that one can learn words in The Emoji Language many orders of magnitude faster than they could in any other language. Using The Emoji Language, two people who have no language in common can learn to share complex ideas, and have full conversations within a matter of hours. This is potentially groundbreaking for global communication as information can be shared simultaneously between many distinct language communities. That said, the ultimate goal of The Emoji Language is to spread joy. Either by being a fun and visual creative tool, or by giving people a neutral voice to communicate across the world.