Drawing on both statistical measures and information theory, our results reveal that, not only does emoji usage have strong dependencies at both the language and country level, but that some languages and countries are much more constrained in the diversity of their emoji usage.
Our study involves 30 languages and countries each, and is conducted over tens of millions of tweets collected from the Twitter decahose over an entire month. In this paper, we conduct a principled, quantitative study to understand emoji usage in terms of linguistic and country correlates. These questions are important, in part because they reveal how people communicate digitally on social platforms, but also because they provide a lens through which different regions and cultures can be studied. The Hot Beverage Emoji appeared in 2003, and now is mainly known as the Coffee Emoji, but also may be reffered as the Tea Emoji.
Despite this ubiquity, many questions remain about their usage, especially with respect to global variations in language and country. Coffee Emoji is used in contexts related to illness or being chilly as if saying I feel cold so I’ll grab a mug of hot tea or I need something hot to drink. Emojis or ‘picture characters’ have become ubiquitous in modern-day digital communication, including social media sharing and smartphone texting.