![]() A dog called Frodo, one of KakaoTalk’s signature characters, proffers a bouquet of roses on one knee while perspiring. ![]() They act as qualifiers that inflect words with humour or sadness they also establish an intimacy that most would shy away from in face-to-face dialogue. Stickers give cadence and character, punch-lines and punctuation, to South Korean text-speak. Line suggests emoji tailored to each message as you type. The latest designs pop out to fill the screen for a couple of seconds some reveal a second emoji when tapped. A few are free others cost between 2,000 won ($1.70) and 3,000 won. KakaoTalk’s emoji team puts out two to three new sets of 24 stickers, many now animated, every day. Today Line’s users, mainly in Japan but also in Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand, send close to 2 billion stickers a day. Moon the rice-cake-shaped man, Cony the rabbit, Brown the bear and vain, blond James (named after Kim himself) were born. James Kim, who managed the design of its first sticker set, says that as the app was developed rapidly, it struggled to transfer photos and videos when it was released to the public, it compensated for this by offering users large emoji to send each other instead. When a tsunami struck Japan in 2011, Naver’s staff there huddled at the office and created Line in six weeks to communicate with each other across a network with much-reduced bandwidths. Stickers first appeared in East Asia in 2011, developed by KakaoTalk in South Korea, and Line, a Japanese messaging app, which is owned by a subsidiary of Naver, a South Korean internet giant. ![]() Around 40m South Koreans (of a total population of 50m) chatter daily on KakaoTalk, a local messaging app and every month they send 2 billion of the particularly elaborate, character-based emoji known as stickers, from a selection of over 10,000. Kim Uryong, a professor of communication at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, says emoji are South Korea’s “third language” (after Korean and English) – worthy, he thinks, of their own dictionary. Such is their appeal that Oxford Dictionaries chose last year’s most shared emoji as the first ever pictograph to be awarded “word of the year” ( below, or “face with tears of joy”).īut it is still in East Asia that emoji are the most avant-garde. A library of hundreds of emoji, which include Docomo’s original designs, now appears in keyboards for use on chat apps, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Snapchat. It was not until the rise of the smartphone at the end of the first decade of the 21st century that emoji lexicons became available across the world. To drag a straitjacketed culture of correspondence – with its honorific formulations and layers of formality – into the terse digital world, Docomo’s team borrowed from the visual grammar of manga (comic books) and expressed abstract concepts with visual symbols: a big bead of sweat on a brow to show embarrassment, for example. By the end of the decade the company had developed 170 emoji to use on iMode, the world’s first mobile internet service. In 1995 Docomo, a Japanese telecoms giant, launched on its pagers the first emoji (“e” for picture, “moji” for written character): a tiny cartoon heart.
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