Is your phone lacking emojis? Your favorite food, your favorite animal or the perfect expression to illustrate your discussion may not be among the approximately 3,800 existing pictograms. Rather than waiting in vain for the handful of new entrants announced each year, 20 Minutes took the lead and came up with its own emoji: couscous.
Because anyone can propose their emoji. The Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization that develops and maintains the computer standard for encoding characters, accepts applications. Step by step, we take the opportunity to dive into the world of emojis, which are increasingly present in our communication.
From animals to food
First, you have to find an idea that doesn’t yet have its pictogram. In an article published last December in the scientific journal iScienceentitled “Communicating biodiversity in the digital age through the phylogenetic tree”, three researchers sounded the alarm: among emojis, vertebrate animals are overrepresented, while plants, fungi, microorganisms and arthropods are largely struggling compared to the real number of species. “The new emojis can serve as a communication tool for struggles, analyzes Pierre Halté, lecturer in Language Sciences. The goal is to get people who are fighting these battles to talk and to get them recognized.”
Do we have a clue to propose an emoji? The dragonfly, for example, does not exist in the current emojis although it is quite recognizable and several species are protected. But that would be ignoring our love of difficulty… and good food. In terms of food and cultural representation, emojis are quite uneven: despite the arrival of falafel or tamale, emojis focus on ultra-globalized dishes like burgers or sushi. But one dish is missing: couscous, a North African dish so popular in France.
The dish of all discord
In 2020, couscous was even included in UNESCO’s cultural heritage. A joint application from the North African countries of Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia, so often opposed on the geopolitical level… but also on the debates around their couscous, more or less different in each country. Who will choose lamb, who will prefer octopus, who will dare to put a merguez on it and call it Moroccan couscous. A culinary excess that Marie Josèphe Moncorgé, a specialist in the history of food in the Mediterranean, directly criticizes: “It’s above all a beautiful French invention.” Lecturer Pierre Halté had warned us: “Social issues are reflected in emojis. The pictogram bank only follows social issues. The Unicode consortium has quite enormous power since it decides how we represent ourselves graphically, as well as our emotions.”
So let’s end the debate directly: Couscous was not born in any particular country. “It’s very simple, it’s of Berber origin,” summarizes Marie Josèphe Moncorgé. Several names were initially given to it, such as “tha’àm” in the 11th century. But with the Arab conquest, couscous appeared in Spain. “The first recipes that we know come from Arab-Andalusian books in the 13th century,” assures the specialist who reads us a few. “Take a fat lamb, remove the skin, remove the tripe, clean the inside.” Breathe, above all. When suddenly, a detail brings us back to reality. The first couscous would in fact have neither carrot, zucchini nor turnip. Only eggplant. “It varies enormously according to the times and the countries. Let’s also remember that the borders were not the same. The common point in all this is the seed.”
A long list of criteria
The file is moving forward, but there is no guarantee that our couscous will ever arrive because the competition is tough. Before, in the 2010s, each messaging service had its own image bank and therefore its own emojis. After an initial refusal to take an interest in it, the Unicode consortium decided to take charge of the standardization of emojis from 2010, at the request of several players including Google. And if the process is open, places are expensive. “There is a certain charge for each emoji present, explains Mark Davis, co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of Unicode. We cannot encode everything, there are questions of budget, but also of ease of use. We try to focus on the most inventive or original.” In this respect, couscous could be the first dish to represent the gastronomy of North Africa, or even the continent. Check.
Another criterion: readability. “Earthquakes are very important in many cultures, but very difficult to represent in a recognizable way in a small format,” quotes Mark David. This was without taking into account the talent of Sébastien Caulier, our designer, who took a little time to design a couscous dish. You still have to know what you want to put in your couscous. Let’s forget the merguez sausages. Let’s limit ourselves to octopus, for fear of offending Algeria and Morocco. But let’s remain gourmets. Who would want to suffer the same fate as Philippe Etchebest? By publishing on his Instagram a couscous resembling “a blend of bland and flavorless pre-cooked steamed ingredients”, as one Internet user summed it up, the famous chef attracted the wrath of the Internet. As is often the case when couscous comes into play on social networks.
So let’s keep it simple, but sophisticated. There will of course be a ton of semolina, carrots, zucchini, good spices [et non le « mélange à la marocaine » de Ducros]. And if we look for the triple meat, it is probably at the bottom of the dish, as a surprise. But let’s remain open to offering a variation to our vegetarian friends. Inclusivity above all.
Couscous will always mean couscous
It is also necessary to show that the emoji corresponds to a term that is searched for and used – and therefore, for us, that couscous is not an obscure local specialty. In this respect too, the Maghreb dish is doing well: on Google, the interest in the expression “couscous” is roughly the same as for “paella”, which was given its own emoji very recently.
The final hurdle is that the emoji must be polysemic. And that may be where it all ends. Even with a little bad faith, it is difficult to associate any other meaning with couscous than the dish itself, or, at the limit, the idea of a meal to be shared in the same dish. “We are trying to find a balance between representing a culture, but also offering something that will be used by millions of people,” insists Mark David. “The emoji must have very broad applications and go beyond borders.”
“Emojis come to play the role of gestures in writing”
This polysemy is one of the most sought-after points. “People sometimes talk about emojis like a language,” says the chairman of the board. A sentence like “My daughter has to go to the dentist soon” is very hard to formulate with only emojis. But that is precisely their advantage, a single one can have a range of meanings. This is what allows them to be used in writing to replace body language.” An analysis shared by Pierre Halté. “In face-to-face conversations, we understand each other thanks to what we say but also thanks to our gestures, adds the lecturer. Emojis come to play the role of gestures in writing.” And if they appeared with online discussions, they have become so much part of our habits that they “are spreading into asynchronous modes of communication, even in my students’ copies.”
Should we say goodbye to our idea? “It sounds specific, but ‘paella’ was accepted, so you never know,” Mark Davis tries to encourage us. If it doesn’t make the cut, the couscous emoji might make its debut in another way. More and more tools allow you to personalize your emojis, like Apple’s Memoji which uses facial recognition. The arrival of AI in phones could further accelerate creation, but we are far from Unicode’s inter-compatibility standards. “It would be very hard to implement,” says Mark Davis. Emoji Kitchen [qui permet de combiner deux émojis pour en créer un nouveau] could use emoji sequences, at a pinch. But the consortium still welcomes these innovations. “So there is no shortage of new emojis; but users lack control over their production,” thinks Pierre Halté. Take back power, remove the merguez from your couscous and prepare your best emoji for next year.