The saying is no longer tell me who you hang out with and I'll tell you who you are, but tell me how many emojis you send and I'll tell you how old you are. Adults have incorporated emojis into their language and simultaneously, young people have stopped using them.
Carmen Pérez, professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Universitat Politècnica de València, analyzed 103,000 WhatsApp messages and concluded that adults (aged 25 to 70) use emojis the most. About 40% of the messages they send contain one. In the case of adolescents (12 to 16 years old), only 1.3% of messages include emojis, a figure that rises to 3% in group conversations.
Like the tourist who returns from his vacation in the south of Spain with an Andalusian accent, adults adopted emojis in a process of linguistic accommodation to their environment. It is explained by Agnese Sampietro, professor at the Universitat Jaume I of Castelló. “That language works by accommodation means that, if an adult is exposed to emojis, either because he is in a group or because he has teenage children, he will incorporate them into his usual language,” the expert specifies.
And indeed, adults adopted emojis, but they did not use them in the same way, or in the same contexts, as young people. Pérez concluded with his study that adults usually use them for two reasons: the first is to emphasize affection in their messages and the second, to “avoid silence” in groups, since emojis allow them to react in a different way. fast.
Thus, there are some people like Pepa (70 years old), who only use them in conversations with their sisters, their children or their grandchildren, because emojis help them “express the love they feel.” Others, like Ana (53 years old), do it so that the messages have a “friendlier and funnier” appearance.
There are also those like Loli and Pilar (both in their fifties) who consider that emojis make it easier for them to express their emotions, without having to find words for them; Thanks to a crying face, they save themselves the effort of writing that they are sad. “It provides a reaction, as if you had the person in front of you, despite the distance,” says Loli.
The study has detected, in men, a slightly different use of emojis. Although some of them, like Javier or Carlos (both in their forties), use them with all their contacts, Pérez explains that men tend to use fewer emojis than women. However, when having conversations with them, men tend to adapt, especially in groups.
In adult men's groups, they are practically not used. “There is not even a kiss there, or anything; just a thumbs up, very occasionally,” Pérez specifies, and contrasts it with the chat of the groups in which men and women mix where then, yes, kissing emojis appear. “In the chats we analyzed we saw that when kisses were sent in groups of only men, it was done in a comical tone. "I love you and kisses are elements that make others laugh," adds the researcher. In women's groups, however, these expressions of affection are totally normal.
Which emoji we send also has to do with the generation to which we belong. There are some more creative adults who, for example, use the emoji of something similar to a goose to say “okay”, but the most general trend is to use emojis with very obvious meanings.
Thus, if Ana wanted to laugh, she would simply choose a face that laughs because she understands that it is the best way to make her interlocutor understand that she found the message funny. On the other hand, other younger people, like Adriana (15 years old), would choose a skull, because they would know that her interlocutor would understand that “they are dying of laughter.”
Sampietro highlights in this sense that different generations also have different references and that therefore, it is normal for emojis to have other uses and meanings. Pérez, for his part, appeals to the disruptive ambition that the younger generations always have. This argument also serves to explain why teenagers no longer use emojis: there is nothing new about them. The first time they used a mobile phone, the system already included them. “Young people always want to distinguish themselves and the absence of emojis is simply a kind of protest or reaction to the millions of these icons that their parents use. It is their way of differentiating themselves,” concludes the researcher.
The way in which adults incorporated these graphic elements caused rejection among adolescents. Currently, 83% of their messages are pure (written) text, while in adults this figure is reduced to 40%. Teenagers broke the trend when adults tried to join in and thus turned emojis into something 'boomer'. The study identified, however, that younger people still use them in one context, and it is just the only one that is not common in adults: saving the names of contacts.
“There are a lot of emojis on the girls' phones, but they are focused on the names they assign to their friends. If one of them is called Martina Blesa, they will not put the last name, but a unicorn, a heart or a chick. Also in those of children, although they have a greater tendency to, for example, if his friend is Argentine, keep it in contact with a flag and not with a heart,” Pérez develops.
So what do teenagers use in their conversations? The text, even to express emotions. They textualize sadness, joy or affection, and if they need to illustrate them they use stickers. The consequence is a generation that writes more than ever, but which is accused of writing, also, worse than ever. But Pérez argues that “there has always been a part of the population with spelling errors, it was just that before it was hidden because not everyone could write.” Along the same lines, Sampietro believes that the youngest people only need to be taught the difference in registers in schools, “because in the digital environment they tend to be informal.”
College students, who live in that inexact space between adolescence and adulthood, prefer stickers and now, these stickers are on the rise. This is concluded by the study by Agnese Sampietro, professor at the Universitat Jaume I of Castelló. “Stickers still have a halo of novelty and are used, above all, because they are considered fun and because they have the possibility of personalizing them,” explains the researcher.
Thus, if Monica (22 years old) is asked why she uses stickers, she responds with an image of two ducks shaking hands and asks “how am I supposed to express this with an emoji?” Marta (also 22 years old) considers that she is closer. “Instead of saying okay or okay, you can send this,” she says, and Iniesta appears on the screen with his thumbs up.
For her part, Simona (23 years old) alleges that thanks to stickers she is able to express emotions that she does not even know how to name, and she sends a sticker of a child with a lost look looking for comfort in his mother's chest.
Likewise, what the young people who participated in Sampietro's study highlighted most was the flexibility that stickers offer: you can create them from your favorite memes or from your friends' photographs. “A kind of secret language is created, because they are stickers that we cannot use with other people, other than those who shared that moment and understand the context of the photograph,” Sampietro specifies.
There are different applications to create stickers; and on some phones, the system allows you to create them directly from the gallery. How easy and simple the process of creating them is makes them even more popular. These types of stickers are the favorites of Guillem (20 years old) and Alicia (31 years old).
However, although it has been proven that stickers are experiencing a boom, studies have not been able to resolve whether, in the future, they will be able to replace emojis as they ousted the previous ASCII emoticons, in which the letter “de” constructed a smile :-D.
Sampietro believes that the most likely option is that both will coexist in the future, but that they will be used in different contexts. “Stickers will specialize in some functions and emojis in others, although there will always be those who refuse to use one or the other,” the researcher points out.
In his analysis he concluded that behind stickers, emojis were the next most chosen (35% of young people prefer them); optimistic figures when compared to those achieved by GIFS (5%) or ASCII emoticons (4%).
