Emoji – the new lingua franca?

You may recall that we have touched upon this subject on our social media pages.

Scholars, and in particular Professor Vyv Evans, a linguist at Bangor university, now have a new and rather alarming concern – the seemingly unstoppable rise of the emoji. For those still in the linguistic dark ages (like the writer), emojis are a modern day version of Egyptian hieroglyphics which (allegedly) 72% of 18 – 25 year olds are using to express their feelings.

Not a happy thought, according to the learned prof. It’s all very well updating the Egyptian system of writing, which, it must be said, represents a high level of artistic achievement, but hieroglyphs produced no Shakespeares or Socrates, although they were excellent in casting spells and cursing enemies.

The Aztecs and the Mayans had the same problem. Lovely script, shame they never invented wheels or developed metalwork.

If emojis do take over the world, translation companies like Anglia Translations Ltd will be out of a job. Or will they?

Chevy recently tried to be clever, appealing to this younger generation of buyers, when they put out a press release totally in emojis. Whilst this may have been a great PR coup (everyone was talking about it), no-one actually knew what it said!

So maybe there will be an opportunity in the future for translation companies like Anglia Translations Ltd – we just need to recruit some emoji translators!

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