The world is getting bigger and more colourful, at least on cell phone keyboards. The Unicode Consortium, which publishes standards for digital text characters, a kind of Internet dictionary, adds new emojis to the existing ones every year – this time one for “pregnant man” and one for a gender-neutral “pregnant person”. Keith Broni is the Chief Emoji Officer Emojipedia, an online encyclopedia of emojis, and participates in Unicode Consortium meetings. So he is very familiar with the pitfalls of the supposedly simple imagery.
SZ: Mr. Broni, carefully asked: Do you assume that the emoji for “pregnant man” will be used frequently?
Keith Broni: Probably not. But, for understandable reasons, there was already a pregnant woman, and for a number of years the Unicode Consortium has had the approach of issuing each person emoji in three variations: female, male and neutral. So the first thing to do was to create consistency. That’s the technical side. The other is that the description of an emoji and its actual use do not always match. What we’re seeing is a person with a big belly, right?
Right. Looks like a pregnant man.
It is also absolutely possible for a male-looking person to become pregnant. But the emoji doesn’t have to exclusively mean pregnancy. For example, it would be perfectly legitimate to say, I just had a gigantic meal.
My colleague Martin Zips also had this idea. He wrote recently in a glossthe emoji could be used to express the deeply Munich feeling “that you ate a lot of white sausages”.
Emojis can take on different meanings. They should, too, in order to be applicable in as many contexts as possible.
Does he have a recent photo of himself? Sure, Keith Broni, Emojipedia’s Chief Emoji Officer, replied at the end of the interview. He later sent this picture.
(Photo: Keith Broni)
How does the Unicode Consortium decide which emojis to add?
The discussions we are having have a lot to do with Plato’s theory of ideas. He assumed that there are perfect forms in all things, to which all real phenomena only approximate. With the emojis, we try to find images that are as universally understandable as possible. Dogs, for example, are a problem. Which race do you choose? For people, we introduced variables in order to be able to represent as broad a spectrum as possible.
Which are they?
As said, there are men, women and a genderless option. Also different skin colors. It’s like saying I’m a cop. I’m a male cop. I am a male police officer of this or that ethnic background. Of course, once you start doing this, you step onto thin ice: Which variables do you allow? For example, for years, people with red hair complained that they weren’t represented. So we created a redhead emoji – a male, a female and a neutral. But many people said that was not enough. They wanted to be able to change the hair of all emojis, as well as the color of their skin.
Why did the consortium decide against it?
This would have made the process of choosing an emoji even more complicated. The number of people each variation represents would have further decreased. An emoji that perfectly represents the individual person is no longer an emoji. But an image.
Nevertheless, more emojis are added every year. Will it always go on like this?
There is a technical limitation in the Unicode standard, but with the approximately 3600 emojis that currently exist, we are still very, very far away from that. Anyone can make a proposal to the Unicode Consortium. If it complies with the guidelines, then it should actually show up on the emoji keyboard at some point. But over the past few years, we’ve seen from the data that many of the newer emojis weren’t being used as much as we’d hoped. That’s why the consortium is getting stricter and stricter. Last year, 112 proposals were accepted. This year it was 37.
Is there a natural upper limit for emoji diversity soon?
I’m just saying that not so many proposals are accepted at the moment. We haven’t seen new human emojis in years that do specific jobs, like dancers or astronauts, instead we’ve seen more gender-neutral variants of the existing ones to make them more universally usable, even across cultures. Overall, Unicode wants to focus more on what absolutely anyone can use.
How come?
A whole new trend are emojis that only work in combination. For example, a flat outstretched hand that will probably be accepted in September. When it stands on its own, one wonders what it’s all about. But if you put a coffee cup emoji next to it, it means: Tada! I present a cup of coffee.
If emojis are supposed to be as universal as possible, why are there different skin types at all? Wouldn’t the neutral yellow be enough?
We didn’t start with universality, and then it suddenly became more diverse. Emojis originally come from Japan, where they were used on the first internet-enabled cell phones, and the characters there all had white skin. Apple put them on the iPhone, that’s how they came out west. It wasn’t until 2015 that the Unicode Consortium introduced the option to choose skin color. The yellow is derived from the color traditionally used for smileys. According to studies, however, people with darker skin in particular do not feel comfortable with it because the yellow emojis are perceived as synonyms for people with white skin. This may also have something to do with the omnipresence of the “Simpsons”. There, all characters are yellow – just not those with darker skin. If the emojis were all yellow, that wouldn’t solve the problems.
You once worked as an “emoji translator” for a London translation agency. What did you do there?
We offered workshops to protect customers from possible faux pas with emojis. Many have implicitly taken on a double meaning in certain groups, which should be known. The sexual innuendos of certain fruits, such as the apricot. The eggplant. Depending on the cultural context, some hand signals can also contain such allusions.
Do you have a favorite emoji?
I should actually say now that I love all my children equally. But I especially like the party hat and horn emoji and the two hands raised in celebration. I like them both because they transport the physical feeling of joy so beautifully. Words alone cannot do that.