Looking Out For New Emojis 👀
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Season 2: Episode 58 Description
Ten News Gets Extra: 😀 Did you know that new emojis have been rolling out? 117 of them! Listen in for what new ones are showing up on devices around the world. 🌎 Show creator Tracy Leeds Kaplan sits down with Jennifer Daniel, head of the emoji subcommittee at the Unicode Consortium, to talk about the world of emojis. 🤪 Have you read the emoji version of Moby Dick? And, test your emoji knowledge on today's Trivia on the Ten. ✅
Sources:
Emoji Version 14.0 List (emojipedia.org)
There are new emojis on the way, and this time they're inclusive (ultranyc.com)
Here are all the new emoji coming to your phone with Unicode 14.0 (xda-developers.com)
50 Awesome Emoji Facts About Your Favorite Faces - Facts.net
Links
🌎 Visit Unicode Consortium to learn more!
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TRANSCRIPT:
Bethany Van Delft 0:03
Smiley, upside-down smiley, rainbow, whale, pink heart, shrug. Today we're discovering new emojis and sharing our favorites. I'm Bethany Van Delft. It's Saturday, January 15th. And this is no ordinary episode of the Ten News. This is the Ten News Gets Extra.
Various Voices 0:28
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Bethany Van Delft 0:37
We've been waiting patiently and now we're finally getting to see brand new emojis in action. 117 new designs to be exact are being rolled out in the latest emoji update, including 16 handshake combinations, a face with one eye peeking, and six sets of hands making a heart, awh. These new emojis represent different genders races and identities with more skin tones for emoji royalty, gender-neutral dancers, emojis, and emojis for pregnant, non-binary people, and trans-men, Bravo emojis. This uptake brings the total number of emojis to 3,633. And they're used by 90% of people worldwide which makes emojis the fastest growing language of all time, no way. Here to tell us more about the world of emojis is Jennifer Daniel. She spoke to our executive producer Tracy Kaplan, about Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit that creates software standards across the world to help make sure our favorite emojis look pretty much the same on all apps, websites, and devices.
Tracy Kaplan 1:59
Welcome, thank you for joining us today on the Ten News. We're really excited to have you here. I'd love for you to explain to our listeners, what exactly is the Unicode Consortium and who's on it?
Jennifer Daniel 2:12
So, Unicode is a volunteer-based organization. And they're responsible for encoding the world's languages. Basically, they're the reason that if you send a message in Hindi from one device, the person you're sending it to, can read it in Hindi before Unicode existed, that was a real problem, people couldn't communicate in their native tongues around the world. So think of it this way, right? Every letter on the screen that you read, whether it be a tablet, a computer, or phone, or anything that's in a digital space, every letter is assigned a code point. So if you send someone a facepalm, emoji, the code point for facepalm is your one, F, nine to six, right? So emoji, even though they look like pictures are really a font. And that's why they sit next to words is because they operate like letters. And they're interchangeable with how you text or communicate online. So like I mentioned, um, Unicode is volunteer-based, right? So it's a small group of people who can kind of offer their work for free, and do this work. But what we try to do is surround ourselves with experts, so people who understand how people communicate, or maybe they have a certain expertise in talking to a doctor recently a cardiovascular surgeon around the anatomical heart and lungs, and a new emoji for X-ray. So we try to surround ourselves by people who really understand the subject matter quite a bit. When making decisions around what is useful, what will be used a lot what is currently being used a lot before we add it, which is why it takes almost two years to add an emoji it takes a really long time because we're, we're embedding it fairly thoroughly.
Tracy Kaplan 4:01
So what I really want to know, is when the consortium makes a decision, those emojis are forever, right?
Jennifer Daniel 4:09
So it's true. Emoji once they're added. Are there forever, which is really interesting if you think about it, right? Because language is flexible and fluid and transient and morphable and emoji are not, emoji stands still.
Tracy Kaplan 4:27
So can you share a little bit about how emojis are actually designed?
Jennifer Daniel 4:31
Yes. So you know, after the consortium makes their list of recommendations, and they become code points and emoji, it's up to designers to well, to get involved. And the first step is we take a look at the image in the proposal, so anyone can propose an emoji and we try to see what was the intent of the person who proposed it in the first place. Then the next step is we confer with subject matter experts, right? There's nothing that doesn't have a subject matter expert, whether it be the knot emoji, we talk to people who are experts in tying knots. Or if it's an anatomical heart or lungs, we talk to doctors. If it's brewing, we talk to people who have made boomerangs. And we try to get a sense of, is this emoji authentic? So like a good example of that might even be the boomerang emoji. And in an earlier version of our design, the angle of the boomerang was more around 90 degrees. And when we showed it to someone who was familiar with Boomerang say, oh, no, that if a boomerang was at that angle, it would never come back to you, because of the way that you know the precision of the torque and the angularity and the velocity, it would, it would just it would, it wouldn't be a boomerang. And so we, you know, we had to change the angles,
Tracy Kaplan 5:51
It's been really wonderful to see kind of the expansion of skin color and having more gender representation. How has the Unicode Consortium played a role in that and what's coming next in that space?
Jennifer Daniel 6:08
we're trying to identify globally relevant concepts, when there are as many genders as there are people in the world, as many foods as there are ingredients on the planet. And a variety of objects that are really only limited by our imagination, every addition to the emoji keyboard is at risk of creating zones of exclusion without consciously trying. So the best we can do is to ensure emoji continue to be as broad and as flexible and as fluid as possible, just like language, and just like people,
Tracy Kaplan 6:46
Okay, for all of our listeners at home, who love using emojis and filling up their parent’s text chats with emojis, how could they learn more?
Jennifer Daniel 6:56
You could go to unicode.org is all the information around what Unicode does and that's everything from every language they support, including emoji, and really, the internet is just you know, there's everyone's an emoji expert, everyone's an emoji historian. So you'll find lots of people talking about it. Just use them. You know, if you really want to understand something, I would just say, just use it, and you can come to your own conclusion.
Tracy Kaplan 6:59
Okay, last question. And we'll let you go. How do you rate our use of emojis on The Ten News?
Jennifer Daniel 7:29
Oh, I love it. I love it. I think they you know, they give you some sense of curiosity. Like what is today's episode gonna be about? I think I know these are noses. What is a nose mean? Is it a pun, or is it literally smelling? So I think it's great. I love how you guys use them.
Bethany Van Delft 7:48
Thanks, Tracy and Jennifer. Ten'ers, do you have an idea for a new emoji? We'd love to see it! Send a picture of your design to helloatthetennews.com and share whatever else you'd like. Did you know that there's an emoji translation of the famous book Moby Dick? Wow. Herman Melville's story about a crazed sea captain chasing a Will was translated by Fred Benenson from English to emojis. And he named his adaptation, emoji dick. Haha, that's awesome. All right. It's time for...
Various Voices 8:26
What, what, what's the big idea?
Bethany Van Delft 8:29
Trivia on the Ten. People use emojis to represent moods, feelings, and style. But what emoji was once crowned word of the year? Was it a) laughing with tears emoji? b) red heart emoji? or, c) poo emoji? Did you guess it? The answer is A. Oxford Dictionary declared the laughing with tears emoji, also known as a face with tears of joy, laughing emoji, and laughing tears emoji word of the year in 2015. It was the first time emojis were given that honor showing that emojis have changed how we communicate. That same crying laughing emoji is one of the most popular. It ranked as the number one emoji on Twitter in 2020. I can totally understand that. 2020, am I right? What about you? Do you use the most? Let us know. Let me tell you how. Put your favorite emoji in a review on whatever podcast app you're using to listen to The Ten News. Time's up. But before we go, here's a quick note for the grownups. Thanks for listening to the Ten News. Look out for our new episodes on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and extras on Saturdays. The Ten News is a coproduction of Small But Mighty Media and Next Chapter Podcasts and is distributed by iHeartRadio. The Ten News creative team is communicating using emojis and includes Tracey Crooks, Pete Musto, Adam Barnard, Tessa Flannery, and Nathalie Alonso. Our production director is Jeremiah Tittle our executive producers are Donald Albright and show creator Tracy Leeds Kaplan. I'm Bethany Van Delft and thanks for listening to the Ten News. The person talking emoji, soon with an arrow over it, emoji. Light brown hand waving emoji. Talk to you soon. Bye.
