Emojis in Written Communication

Abstract

The present study examines the grammatical role of sequential emojis in both the Standard Arabic language and the English language, focusing on Arabic-English bilinguals. Also, it examines how emojis are represented in the sentence structure of both languages, as subject verb object (SVO) in English language and verb subject object (VSO) in the Standard Arabic language. It also exposes whether there is an inflectional of the English language over the use of emojis in the Standard Arabic language. An online of two experiments with 22 pictures was the main analysis instrument of this study, and 16 participants were asked to describe the pictures in two ways: one with emojis as many emojis as possible, and the second with word sentences. Two of the 22 pictures depict situations that would be described with sentences containing prepositions to ensure varied responses. There were two online forms for participants to fill. Online forms are predesigned by Microsoft Form, and pictures contained in the forms were obtained from Multilingual Picture (MultiPic) databank by Duñabeitia et al. (2018). One form with Standard Arabic instructions and responses, and the second form with English instructions and responses. Overall, the findings of the two experiments show that there is not quite significant difference between the English language and Standard Arabic language in regard to the sequence of emojis. This means there is a possibility to discover a grammatical element in sequential emojis, as Cohn (2013) points out that emojis in sequence order might have syntactical structure.