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.
Over the last four or five years there’s been a big project to think about gender representation in emoji, making sure that for people emoji they either have no visible gender representation (like the rugged up skier ⛷️ or tiny tiny jockey 🏇🏿) or woman/man/person options (👩🌾🧑🌾👨🌾). To make the man/woman gender variations, the emoji is typically a combination of the ‘person’ version with the relevant ‘gender’ symbol (female: ♀️, male: ♂️), which are also symbols in the Unicode set.
Most of this work was done from 2019 to 2021. As part of their decision making, Unicode decided to treat the Person in Suit Levitating emoji as not requiring gendered options. in 2022 Jeremy Burge (former Chief Emoji Officer at Emojipedia) and I decided to do a bit of work exploring whether this was really the best solution.
Person in Suit Levitating (Google Noto version above) is one of those quirky emoji with an odd little history.
This character was originally introduced into the Webdings font as an “exclamation mark in the style of the rude boy logo found on records by The Specials“. This levitating man was known as Walt Jabsco.
Person in Suit Levitating was approved as part of Unicode 7.0 in 2014 under the name “Man in Business Suit Levitating” and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.
So, Levitating Person definitely started out as male, and if you scroll through the different ways it looks for different companies, it’s still very masculine. Twitter and Facebook have created Woman Levitating and and Man Levitating versions, but these only work on Twitter or Facebook. Below is the Twitter Twimoji version:
In our proposal we considered two main factors. The first is that all other emoji where there’s no gender option involves someone (a) tiny, like the person using a parachute 🪂, or (b) covered by bulky, gender neutralising clothing, like the snowboarder 🏂 . We also looked at how people are actually using the Levitating Person emoji in a set of tweets. In that small set of data we found that people are using the current, still very masculine Twimoji ‘person’ as male rather than female at a rate of 10 to 1. Just saying it’s a ‘person’ and asking vendors to tweak the design has clearly not worked to make this emoji function in a gender neutral way.
Ultimately, the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee decided that the current levitating person was sufficiently gender neutral to not update. I’m sharing our proposal here because Unicode only publish accepted proposals. Perhaps someone will find this worth revisiting one day, and if not, it was interesting to consider and explore. For my own benefit I’ve added the Twitter Levitating Woman to various Slack and Discord channels I’m in.
In the conclusion of the paper that I wrote with Gretchen McCulloch on the way emoji function as digital gestures, we noted:
The paradigm of emoji as digital gesture has potentially important
ramifications for the Unicode Consortium’s emoji proposal and approval
process. The Consortium has a dedicated Emoji Subcommittee,[5]
which has been responsible for expanding the number of emoji in Unicode
from the original set of 176 in 1999 to 2,784 in Unicode v. 11.0, and
the demand for further emoji expansion shows no sign of slowing down.[…] The analysis of emoji as gesture can help inform future emoji encoding
by incorporating evidence from names for emblem gestures and even
typological surveys of common gestures across cultures.
Since we wrote that paper, I’ve been working with people at Unicode to bring some of the gesture literature to the emojification process. I’ve helped write two guideline documents as part of the updated process for proposing new emoji:
ESC Guidelines around Gestures and Emoji (L2/20-274)
Gesture Emoji for Consideration, Unicode 15.0 (L2/20-282)
It’s not always the case that when you make a suggestion at the end of an academic paper that you get the chance to so directly implement that suggestion!
If you’re thinking of submitting a gesture emoji I hope that these documents are useful. This process has also really stressed for me just how little we know about the diversity of emblem gestures across cultures and regions (another observation from the conclusion of that paper and something I hope to start working on).
When you last heard from the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee in April of
2020, the Unicode Consortium had just announced a 6-month delay to
Unicode Version 14.0 due to COVID-19. Despite all of this :waves at the
world: we’ve been busy.
What’s new? Great question!
During this pause in proposal submissions, the Unicode Emoji
Subcommittee consulted with experts, developing a process that more
completely reflects our criteria for inclusion in an effort to
prioritize globally relevant emoji. We’ve looked for new ways to
reconcile the rapid, transient nature of modern communication with the
formal, methodical process required by a standards body like the Unicode
Consortium.
Moving forward, the proposal review season will be open each year from
April 15-August 31. To submit a proposal, first read these
Guidelines and fill out this form.
A summary of my paper with Gretchen McCulloch, which looked at the way emoji with text are similar to the way we use gesture with speech. Page also includes links to related content.
This is a substack newsletter from Jennifer Daniel, who has lots of interesting things to say about emoji, and just happens to also be the Emoji Subcommittee Chair. Her most recent post is about the re-opening of proposals.
“When there are as many foods as there are ingredients in the world,
as many genders as there are people on the planet, and a variety of
objects only limited by your imagination, every addition to the emoji
palette is at risk of creating zones of exclusion without consciously
trying”
“🚀 Should there be a cyclone emoji for both the southern and northern hemisphere? Are pink ballet shoes problematic? How the future of the emoji keyboard is being shaped and the questions it raises. With special guest Jennifer Daniel, Chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee.”
