Over the last couple of years I’ve had a bit of a running thing with emblem gestures - those gestures that have a fixed meaning and a fixed form for a particular group. I’ve done posts about air quote gestures, worked on emoji proposals for head nods and shakes, and written a journal article about the emblem gestures from The Hunger Games and Star Trek.
All of this work is been happening because I’ve been working with Kensy Cooperrider on a major review of the emblem literature, which is now published in Glossa. I started working on this article in the first year after returning to work when my first child was born, so it’s fitting that it’s finishing up pretty much four years later when my second child is a similar age. Kensy also became a parent while we were writing this paper. It’s been a slow and steady approach with this project!
This paper aims to summarise what make emblems, especially what makes them so interesting, and how they relate to spoken language, signed language, other gesture categories and other phenomena. We also surveyed the known literature of emblems across the world’s languages, noting that we need to do a lot better at documenting the world’s diversity of emblems. We also lay out the kinds of questions we should be asking about emblems, and the exciting cross-disciplinary potential for work in this area.
I really enjoyed starting a new topic deep dive. I especially appreciated that Kensy agreed to join me on this adventure. I’ve long admired his writing, both academic publications and his excellent work for general audiences across a variety of publications. His podcast Many Minds is also great.
Definitely more from me on the topic of emblems in the future.
Abstract
Emblems—the thumbs up, the head shake, the peace sign, the shhh—are communicative gestures that have a conventional form and conventional meaning within a particular community. This makes them more “word-like” than other gestures and gives them a distinctive position at the interface between language and gesture. Here we provide an overview of emblems as a recurring feature of the human communicative toolkit. We first discuss the major defining features of these gestures, and their points of commonality and difference with neighbouring communicative phenomena. Next, we review efforts to document emblems around the world. Our survey highlights the patchiness of global coverage, as well as strengths and limitations of approaches used to date. Finally, we consider a handful of open questions about emblems, including how they mean, how they are learned, and why they exist in the first place. Addressing these questions will require collaboration among linguists, lexicographers, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others. It will also deepen our understanding of human semiotic systems and how they interface with each other.
Reference:
Gawne, Lauren & Cooperrider, Kensy. 2024. Emblems: Meaning at the interface of language and gesture. Glossa, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.9705 [Open Access]
Gawne, L., & Cooperrider, K. (2022). Emblems: Gestures at the interface. Preprint version of this paper on PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/my5an
Unicode 15.1 will be rolling out to phones and computers across this year. It will include lots of new CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) ideographs, some new line-breaking rules for syllabic scripts, and a handfull of new emoji! There’s a phoenix, a breaking chain, a lime and a brown mushroom, as well as new family silhouettes and a handful of existing emoji, but now facing rightward!
The two emoji I’m most excited about are Head Shaking Horizontally and Head Shaking Vertically. That’s head shaking and head nodding to you! I wrote these proposals with Jennifer Daniel and the Unicode emoji subcomittee team.
Why the more elaborate names? Well, Unicode tend to describe emoji by form, not function. That’s for very good reason, because a head nod might be agreement for you, but in other cultures a vertical movement of the head can mean disagreement. This has provided a double challenge for emoji designers, who have to both show movement and also facial features that aren’t too positive or negative. Below are the Emojipedia pair. They’ve done a great job.
These two emoji are actually made by combining a classic emoji face wtih the horizontal (🙂↔️) or vertical arrows (🙂↕️ ) using a special Unicode character called a Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ, ‘zwidge’ to it’s friends), which means that even though they’re two characters they smoosh together to create one emoji. It’s the same process that makes all the different flags, as well as the gender and skin tones.
In fact, all of the emoji in 15.1 are combinations using the ZWJ mechanism; including the phoenix (🐦🔥), lime (🍋🟩) and brown mushroom (🍄🟫 ). Those new right-facing emoji are a combination of the usual left-facing emoji and a rightward arrow🚶➡️ .
It’s exciting that Unicode have decided to try this set of right-facing characters. Many emoji are left-facing, which is a legacy of their Japanese origins (the word order in Japan means that right-facing makes sense). I’ve been complaining about emoji directionality since 2015, and I’m glad that this update will mean that lil emoji dude can finally escape a burning building for those of us with a left-to-right writing system and Subject Verb Object word order. They’ve started with a bunch of people in motion. It will be interesting to see if this set is where it stops or not.
(no no buddy!! To the exit!!)
The use of the ZWJ is an elegant solution because it means that you don’t have to make a whole new codepoint for the emoji, it just uses the old one. If someone doesn’t have their phone or computer update to 15.1 then it should fall back to just showing 🚶➡️, which somewhat conveys the intent. That’s the magic of a good ZWJ combination.
In this new article I get to bring together three of my favourite things: gesture, science fiction and working with the best collaborators. I teamed up with genre author and creative writing expert Dr Peta Freestone and corpus whiz Jess Kruk to look at the different ways scifi gestures also have lives in the real world.
We used emoji evidence to look at the ways use of the Vulcan Salute (🖖) on Twitter references Star Trek, as well as nerd culture in general. There’s no emoji for the Three Finger Salute from the Hunger Games (…yet?), so we used a newspaper corpus to see what we could learn about this gesture. It has become a gesture of protest by younger people against a variety of regimes across South and South East Asia, and is becoming untethered from its narrative origins. For this gesture, newspapers provided a good, nuanced understanding of the meaning and function of this gesture.
This article partially started out of a blog post where I was pondering fictional gestures in scifi and fantasy. The article is part of a special issue of Linguistic Vanguard on the linguistics of scifi, with a special focus on corpus methods, which was edited bySofia Rüdiger and Claudia Lange. It’s fun that this article stands alongside lots of great articles including work on the sociolinguistics of Firefly, the lexical influence of Star Wars and changing gender dynamics on Star Trek.
Abstract
Research
on emblems to date has not drawn on corpus methods that use public data. In
this paper, we use corpus methods to explore the use of original fictional
gestures in the real world. We look at two examples from popular science
fiction, the Vulcan salute from Star Trek
and the three-finger salute from The
Hunger Games. Firstly, a Twitter corpus of the Vulcan salute emoji shows
that it is used to represent Star Trek
fandom and wider nerd culture, alongside its use as a greeting. Secondly, a
global news corpus shows the three-finger salute has come to be used as a
pro-democracy protest gesture across political and cultural boundaries in South
East Asia. These corpus studies show different trajectories for the two
gestures, with the three-finger salute escaping the confines of its fictional
world, while the Vulcan salute has come to stand in as a reference to the media
it originated from. We conclude with a reflection on the opportunities,
challenges and limitations of bringing corpus methods to gesture studies.
Reference
Freestone, P., J. Kruk & L. Gawne. 2023. From Star Trek to The Hunger Games: emblem gestures in science fiction and their uptake in popular culture. Linguistic Vanguard. doi: 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0006
The Vulcan salutation is such an iconic feature of the Star Trek universe that it has its own Wikipedia page and was added to the Unicode emoji set (🖖). There are many ways to build a fictional reality, and gestures are one way of doing this.
These gestures are often Emblems, a type of gesture that has a fixed form and a fixed meaning for the group that use them. Gestures are distinct from performing magic or Jedi mind tricks, which in the fictional world are technically actions. There’s also this fun paper that looks at the way people in scifi use gestures to interact with computers and technology.
The intentional use and fixed meaning of emblem gestures mean that they can take on a life outside the fictional world. For example, here’s European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti in 2015 on the ISS, in a final salute to Leonard Nimoy.
Perhaps the most fascinating example of an emblem gesture extending beyond fiction in recent times has been the emergence of the three fingers salute from the Hunger Games books and films. This gesture has been used in pro-democracy protests in countries including Hong Kong, Thailand and Myanmar. The image below is from the 2021 protests in Myanmar.
These examples got me thinking about emblem gestures in other fantasy and scifi worlds. A recent one that came to mind was the two fingered blessing from Emperor Cleon in the television version of Foundation. Iconic enough in-world that statues of him are positioned using this gesture. It has a long history in Greek rhetoric and Christian iconography.
There’s a rude hand gesture in P.M. Freestone’s Shadowscent books - two fingers raised in a backhanded V, which parallels the Up Yours gesture in the UK and Australia, but also fits the in-world context as the offensive act is to plug someone’s nostrils (the hight of rudeness in a scent-focused world!).
I’m sure there are others too. I’ll undoubtedly start noticing them and add them to this post! (if you have any examples, I’d love to hear from you!)
A lovely longform article from William Park at the BBC, on gesture and meaning and time. It features quotes from some gesture researchers I admire, and I’m also in there talking about one of my areas of research overlap at the moment, emoji and gesture. From the piece:
No hand gesture is ever read in isolation, with the exception of one kind: emoji.
The
Internet has opened up this explosion of informal written communication
and there’s been this gap in what we can express in informal writing –
Lauren Gawne
If
you have ever struggled to express sarcasm in text you might have
resorted to using emoji to help you out. Gawne says that our written
language is distinctly lacking in ways to express sentiments like
sarcasm because informal writing is a relatively new idea. For
millennia, she says, informality was restricted to speech.
This
gesture has various meanings in different cultures, but the wider
context can give us clues to deciphering it (Credit: Emmanuel
Lafont/BBC)
Gawne
has worked with linguist Gretchen McCulloch and Jennifer Daniel from
Unicode to include a greater diversity of hand gestures in the official
Unicode dictionary of emoji. What excites Gawne about encoding hand
gestures in the Unicode dictionary is that they are so versatile. The
fact that (like real hand gestures) their meanings can change is useful,
she says. An image of a starfish is a starfish to everyone, but a hand
shape can have whatever meaning the users want to ascribe to it.
