ABSTRACT
Emoji have become a sui generis pictorial language that complements (and sometimes even replaces) alphabetic writing in informal digital communications. Emoji have evolved into a visual discourse that is designed, primarily, to support the expression of mood, point-of-view, and other prosodic features of oral speech in writing. As such, they serve mainly phatic and emotive functions, having emerged as communicative surrogates for face-to-face social protocols and expressivity (facial expression, mood cues, irony, etc.). This entry deals with the main phatic and emotive functions of emoji, as well as commenting on the crystallization of the emoji code as an autonomous language, indicating that it is more than a simple substitutive writing code but an evolving language that is entirely its own. Emoji codes thus provide a field laboratory for gauging how language and writing are intrinsically intertwined and what this entails for the future of human communication.
