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Do young and old people interpret (or use) emojis differently? - Yes, to some extent. Actually with most emojis we see a huge overlap in interpretation and also use. But there are some frequent emojis which are, on average, interpreted differently by older and younger people in our studies. For example, the slighly smiling face 🙂 and its upside down variant 🙃 are seen as more positive by older participants, while the little dot-eyes are seen as cold and not authentic ("psychopath eyes") by younger people. Similarly, the winking smiley 😉 is used by the older group to mark any jokes or fun (similarly to the original ;-) emoticon), and younger people find it often completely inappropriate and sexually suggestive #emojis #WorldEmojiDay #linguistics
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@DancerOnSand@troet.cafe Keine Beschränkung. Ich finde schon die Definition von "Medien" in diesem Sinne schwierig. Hausaufgaben, Haushalt, Hobbies, Familie müssen stattfinden, der Rest ist Freizeit zur freien Einteilung.
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🤔 Are #emojis a universal language? - No, for two reasons. 1) They are not a language, as they do not show the properties that human languages have: grammatical structure and free combinatorics, enabling us to express complex thoughts. 2) They are not really universal. While many emojis are interpreted similarly all over the world (I guess it's pretty clear what one could mean by 🍕 ), some emoji meanings are closely tied to cultural assumptions (e.g., some of the gestures 👍 , buildings ⛩️ , food), and others are very context-dependent and might follow different conventions in various groups, including linguistic or regional groups (e.g., 🙃 for which we found strong differences between populations in Norway/US vs. Germany/Bulgaria). #WorldEmojiDay #linguistics
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"what are the two readings of 🙃?" - Roughly, one group sees this emoji as a whimsical, funny alternative to the "regular" smiley 🙂 , which they also read as positive ("happy, smiling"). The other group sees it as sarcastic, passive-aggressive, or uncomfortable. There are many nuances but those are the two groups. #emojis #WorldEmojiDay #linguistics
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"what about double meanings like in 🍆🥦 and 🍑?" - Ah yes, these ambiguities are very famous. In order to get a new emoji approved nowadays, it's even helpful to be able to point out additional meanings and usages that are metaphorical in this way. The Unicode consortium is wary of introducing too many new emojis, and so those that can "carry more weight" and fill many needs at once are preferred.
In internet corpora the vegetable-related uses of these emojis are probably quite rare (but I must admit I haven't checked yet) - and the metaphorical meanings probably dominate. Though there are also many insider uses of emojis that aren't super widely known outside of their circle. This is comparable to other kinds of linguistic codes or innovations (e.g. in youth language) and not limited to only emojis. #WorldEmojiDay #emojis #linguistics
As this thread is slowing down (but feel free to keep the questions coming), this is also a great time to plug the public "Linguistics of Emojis" Zotero library, which we maintain. Over 300 scientific works on the linguistics of emojis - check it out! 🤓 #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay https://www.zotero.org/groups/2613859/linguistics_of_emojis/library
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@skyglowberlin@fediscience.org "Can emojis be removed from Unicode? Or are they there forever once they are in?" - As of now, once they're in, they're in. The code point in Unicode is then reserved for this symbol. This can be a problem because emojis are kind of open-ended (other than alphabets and many other symbol lists). And it's possible that some emojis turn out to be rarely used. I could imagine that eventually some platforms just stop supporting a certain emoji - but it's really useful to have an international encoding standard which is fully supported by most technology (as anyone who has programmed or written online text in the early 2000s can attest). That's why getting a new emoji approved has become so hard - we're basically creating a kind of tech debt for a potentially long time.
Funny story - you could try creating a post now with a Unicode character from an "empty" code point in the emoji range, in the hope that it will get assigned in a later round. I've seen such a post on the old Twitter, which later was filled with all kinds of random emojis, when you look at it in a few years. #linguistics #emojis #WorldEmojiDay
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☝️ However, there is some evidence that #emojis or at least symbols similar to emoticons were used before the internet. Many people know "rebus" examples where words are replaced by little icons like in this children's book. And I've seen an example of a hand-written letter with emoji-like faces as annotations (but I can't find it right now on my computer 😬 ) #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
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"which emojis are used the least often?" - Great question, and we rarely find data on this! But luckily, we studied this at least for two corpora with German users (and admittedly only for face emojis). So: Many object or symbol emojis (from the "tail end" of the emoji list) are very, very rarely used. Overall, faces and hearts are the most frequent. Among the face emojis, we compiled the full list of usages from a huge Twitter corpus (semi-public communication, 2014-2022) and a much small WhatsApp chat corpus (private or group communication). You can find the frequencies in this table linked below (and sort by frequency by clicking on the column). The least frequent face emoji in the large corpus was the "frowning face with open mouth" 😦, which most people have never seen before. Personally, I think it's pretty ambiguous and not very useful, as there are better emojis for anything it might express. #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDayhttps://tscheffler.github.io/2024-Face-Emoji-Norming/ratings.html
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These traditional emoticons created from standard punctuation characters, letters and numbers have been largely crowded out by colorful #emojis in the last 15 years. Emojis started being supported by Japanese mobile communication platforms (phones) in the 80s/90s, but became widespread world-wide only when they were introduced into the international Unicode standard in 2010 - and subsequently supported by all kinds of technology providers and software.
So the 2010s is when "it all got out of control" @Kuchenschwarte@fnordon.de 😅 #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
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@simon_on_energy@fediscience.org Do you have an example you can share? We're talking about "bullshit" later today in my class and including some bs graphs might be interesting for the discussion
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(Little aside: The Unicode list provides an international standard of symbol encodings which should be supported - including our Latin characters as well as characters and symbols for hundreds of other languages of the world. This ensures that if you write Hindi or Korean or Arabic or Finnish, another person will be able to decipher and potentially read your digital document. Since 2010, this list also includes emojis - so my "hugging-face" will show on your computer as your "hugging-face" 🤗 ) #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay #emojis
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@Kuchenschwarte@fnordon.de "Why are emojis standardly not animated?" - a complicated question. The Unicode standard lists a code point for each emoji (and other symbols, too), as well as, roughly, its meaning (really a short name). You can see the full list below. E.g., codepoint "U+1F601" corresponds to "beaming face with smiling eyes" or 😁 .
You can think of the look of that emoji on your individual platform as a kind of "font" - the platforms are free to implement the look of each emoji according to their house style. This is similar to the character "A" looking different in different newspapers, platforms, or styles. In most Western platforms emojis so far are not animated. But in many widely used Chinese platforms (WeChat and especially Weibo, for example), many emojis are animated. So I guess it's a question of style. #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDayhttps://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html
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Two other writing systems are often compared to #emojis: #Chinese characters and #hieroglyphs. @Kuchenschwarte@fnordon.de
I'm not really an expert on either, but I did study Chinese in university and recently had a long conversation with an Egyptologist colleague (who gave me the 101 on hieroglyphs 😄 ). Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was an alphabet (ie, each character roughly corresponds to a sound like p, t, k). So while the hieroglyphs resemble objects, they were not read as such, at least not in the later stages. (Btw. Latin characters also developed from picture-like objects in many cases, but it's been a long time since these pictures were recognizable)
Thus, emojis do not resemble Egyptian hieroglyphs in my view - each emoji corresponds most closely to a word or concept, not a single letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
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@3sat Maske auf, wenn’s voll ist: Weniger Ansteckung von all den Rumhustenden und als Bonus bleibt der Platz neben mir meist frei 🤗
New PhD position in my group on Digital Forensic Linguistics! 🧑💻 If you think that's you, please contact me and/or apply! #linguistics #joboffer #phdPosition #phd https://jobs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/jobposting/870a96abc9c1d265d30d96c359a15f0d1c02b97c0
Niemand:
Eurowings:
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Out of my two postdocs so far, one got a permanent job elsewhere (hence the search) and the other one just received a significant DFG grant which she's starting in a few months. Success stories! Come join us 🤗
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@ElenLeFoll@fediscience.org #linguistics is called „a discipline particularly little known“ 😢
Ich hasse es auch extrem, dass "krank" für Wissensarbeiter*innen in der durchbürokratisierten Uni der Gegenwart auch einfach heißt "arbeite von zuhause so weiter wie sonst auch" wenn man nicht für eine Erkältung alles vor die Wand fahren lassen will. Und ist ja klar wer das am Ende wieder ausbadet.
Tricks of the seasoned traveling academic: took a picture of my selection for the conference dinner before submitting 💡 #academicChatter
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@quidcumque@rheinhessen.social 🙃 😭 thank you for explaining this to him! Not often that it's so clear...
I guess that’s the butt end of “just throw in the data, LLM can write the paper no problem”. I really appreciate the intentions behind the ARR system but it doesn’t work. I first realized just how broken it was several years ago as area chair when some of my reviewers were undergraduate students #nlproc
17,000 submissions 🙄🤪😭🙄🤪
Today at #LREC2026, Sebastian Reimann will present „A Novel Dataset and Three Ways to Approach Automatic Metaphor Detection in German Religious Online Forums“ in the Workshop on Learning Non-Literal Expressions with Small Data (NLE 2026), 11:40 in Room Formentera #nlproc #metaphors @ruhr-uni-bochum.de
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@ElenLeFoll@fediscience.org @dingemansemark@scholar.social I know!! Pretty clever argumentation linguistically, I mean as @andreaswalker@openbiblio.social said, in some real semantic sense, all awards are "made up". So it's not any more or less cheating to invent one and give it to yourself 💡
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@biglinter Brauche ich nicht. Habe ich nie behauptet. Komplett falsche Annahmen, die hier auf mich projiziert werden. Ich muss nicht traurig sein, wenn sich jemand freiwillig entscheidet, sich woanders hin zu setzen 🤷♀️ (nb auch basierend auf komplett falschen Schlüssen aber das soll mir egal sein)
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@SchreibeEinfach@23.social über welche Grenzen sprichst du? Ich zahle aktuell 1060,20 Euro monatlich als freiwillige Versicherte in der GKV und verdiene weniger als die Hälfte des angegebenen Bundestagsabgeordneten. Klar die Höchstsätze sollten weg, aber ich fände es wichtiger, zuerst woanders anzusetzen. Sonst ist der Effekt eher gegenteilig: nicht Hochverdienende bezahlen ihren Anteil, sondern noch mehr von ihnen verabschieden sich in die Private.
Aber in meiner Frage ging es nur um die Zahlen, die mir deutlich zu niedrig scheinen. Außer, es sind schon Arbeitgeberanteile und Pflegeversicherung abgezogen.
Politik-Expert*innen: Ist es üblich, dass ein Landtag eine Stellungnahme zu einem Antrag von einer Einzelperson anfordert (nicht einem Verein, Verband oder einer Firma)? Und ist diese Person eigentlich verpflichtet, der Aufforderung nachzukommen? Also rein interessehalber, denn es ist ja vermutlich doch schon einiges an Arbeit, die nicht vergütet wird (?)
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@mxp@mastodon.acm.org yup, seems to be a Swiss thing! I also recently had to disclose that for a talk I gave in Bern. Weird.
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@mxp@mastodon.acm.org I think it was supposed to be some tax thing? I think I also had to say if the spouse is a Swiss national and/or government employee? Something like that
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@benni@social.tchncs.de Seed-Wert und „Temperatur“ (ein Hyperparameter für Kreativität - wie unwahrscheinlich die Ausgaben sind, die gewählt werden) auf 0.
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@leitmedium@tldr.nettime.org 🤭 Ich meine, es ist auch die Rückreise... man sollte denken, dass deren "KI" oder Template das irgendwie mit einbezieht??
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edit: hab's!
Hat jemand Zugang zur Forschung & Lehre?
https://esv-elibrary.de/journal/article/99.160005/ful.2026.05.11
#icanhazpdf
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@SchreibeEinfach@23.social Können die Zahlen stimmen? Höchstsatz der GKV ist aktuell schon über 1000 Euro pro Monat. Weiß nicht, ob der Bundestag davon die Hälfte übernimmt? Bei mir (Landesbeamtin) nicht.
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@v_i_o_l_a@openbiblio.social aha, spannend. Was ist wohl der Unterschied zwischen "Philosophy of Linguistics" und "Philosophy of Language"? 🤔