The World Uses One Emoji More Than All Others

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In hundreds of years,emojicould become the digital cave artof our times.At least that’s what Mayank Kejriwal,a research assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California,speculates.His latest research studying emoji usage on Twitter is spurring him to think about whether our collective real-time behavior on social media can capture and reveal something about the present human condition.

數百年后，表情符號或將成為我們這個時代的數字洞穴藝術。至少南加州大學工業與系統工程系的研究助理教授馬揚克·凱吉里瓦爾如此推斷。他最近研究了推特上的表情符號使用情況，由此激發進一步思考，即我們在社交媒體的實時集體行為能否表達和揭示人類的某些現狀。

2 “The single-most interesting insight that came out [of the study] was that people really are very universal when it comes to emoji usage,” he says.“No matter what language you look at,you see a very clear trend emerging.”

2 凱吉里瓦爾指出：“（研究）最為有趣的發現是，人們在表情符號的使用上確實很富共性。無論是哪種語言，都顯現出非常清晰的趨勢。”

3 He and his team analyzed over 1.5 billion public tweets from October 2016 to determine how Twitter users from all over the globe were employing emoji in their social communications.Then,they isolated the tweets that were GPSenabledand scoured the metadatato find language information.

3 他和團隊分析了2016年10月以來超過15 億條公開推文，以確定全球推特用戶如何在社交中使用表情符號。隨后，他們抽取了附有定位信息的推文，在元數據中搜尋語言信息。

4 “We picked a period well in the prepandemic because we wanted to study very general trends,not event-specific like after an election,” he explains.The team wanted to examine a time before TikTok,Snapchat,and other platforms emerged—a time in which the majority of social media users were concentrated on Twitter.“We tried to figure out which emoji were popular,” he says.“Is there a language difference,country difference,or are they universal? How globalized are we in the emoji landscape?”

4 “我們想研究非常普遍的趨勢，而非諸如大選后這種特定的趨勢，因此選定的時間段早在疫情之前。”他解釋道。他們團隊想要考察大多數社交媒體用戶都集中在推特的時期，即抖音國際版、色拉布等平臺尚未嶄露頭角的時期。“我們想找出流行的表情符號。”他說，“這些表情符號是否會因為推主語言和國別不同而千差萬別？抑或如出一轍？表情符號領域的全球化程度有多高？”

The most popular kinds of emoji

最受歡迎的表情符號

5 Indeed,they found that people were using emoji in a similar fashion regardless of nationality or language.The most popular type of emoji everywhere are those that depict emotions (joy,sadness,anger),with the laugh-cry face topping the charts as the single-most popular emoji.Smiling faces and hearts are very well-loved too.“These tend to be more emotive.They either express an opinion or an emotional state.That suggests that we are emotional creatures,” says Kejriwal.

5 他們果然發現，無論國別或語言為何，人們使用表情符號的方式類似。世界上最受歡迎的表情符號類型是情感表達類（高興、悲傷、生氣），其中“笑哭”的表情榮登榜首，成為最流行的表情符號。“微笑臉”和“愛心”也很受歡迎。“這些表情符號都更情緒化，要么表達觀點，要么表現情感狀態。這說明我們是感性生物。”凱吉里瓦爾說道。

6 Western nations appeared to favor smiling faces more,and most countries had relatively comparable proportions of hearts to smiley faces,except for the Middle East,where “the blue heart is very popular,” he says.“The normal red heart was very popular in South American countries,including Brazil.”

6 西方國家似乎更喜歡微笑臉，除中東地區外的大多數國家，愛心和笑臉的使用比例大致相當。“藍色愛心在中東很受歡迎。”他說道，“常見的紅色愛心在包括巴西在內的南美洲國家非常流行。”

7 Even though it was not part of the study,from what Kejriwal has observed,many responses he sees to memeson the internet tend to contain more emoji.“The really good memes have an emotional impact,so it kind of goes to the original claim,that when there’s an emotional impact,emoji are used more,words are used less often,” he says.“Even just thinking about the words takes energy.It’s just easier to send off an emoji.”

7 盡管不在研究之列，但凱吉里瓦爾觀察發現，許多網友回復網絡爆紅內容時往往會使用更多表情符號。“真正精彩的網絡爆紅內容都能感染人的情緒，這多少印證了此前的觀點，即有情感效應時，表情符號的使用頻率會更高，文字的使用頻率則較低。”他說，“僅是構思文字表達也要費神，發送表情符號則輕而易舉。”

Emoji for conveying a sense of place

傳達地域感的表情符號

8 The experiential emoji populate the middle of the rankings.They’re not as popular as the symbols that show an emotion,but are still used moderately.These are the food symbols and the activity symbols (like football,rugby,or beach balls).Sometimes,which specific experiential emoji were popular was location or event-dependent.Experiences can also include holidays that are celebrated worldwide.For example,the Halloween emoji was very popular in October in the US,but also in Canada and Australia.

8 體驗型表情符號排在受歡迎榜單的中間位置。它們不像情感表達類符號一樣風靡，但仍有不少人使用。這些表情符號有關食物和活動（例如足球、橄欖球或沙灘球）。有時，哪些特定的體驗型表情符號能夠風行與地點或事件息息相關。這些體驗包括全世界都慶祝的節日。如每年10月，有關萬圣節的表情符號不僅會在美國盛行，在加拿大和澳大利亞亦會形成潮流。

9 “We did find that in the vacation places,the emoji [usage] was more.If you had coastal cities,people tended to tweet more,and these [tweets] also had more emoji.For example,in Australia’s coastal cities,all the beachrelated emoji were always there.And if you had great weather in coastal cities,you would see much more diversity of emoji,” Kejriwal says.“In the Scandinavian countries,we didn’t find that much diversity of emoji usage.They tended to be clustered around a small set of emoji.”

9 “的確，我們發現，在度假勝地，表情符號（的使用頻率）更高。身處海濱城市的人往往發更多推文，這些（推文）也包含更多的表情符號。例如，在澳大利亞的沿海城市，總能發現所有與海灘有關的表情符號。如果這些沿海城市恰逢好天氣，你看到的表情符號要豐富得多。”凱吉里瓦爾說，“我們沒在斯堪的納維亞半島國家的用戶推文中找到如此豐富多彩的表情符號，這些國家偏愛某一小部分符號。”

10 Comparatively,flags and the nationalistic symbols were not used as much as other types of emoji,except at spectacles such as sporting events.“What the data showed us is that in their dayto-day lives,people are more focused on their emotional states and their experiences,at least pre-pandemic,” he says.“The distribution was very similar,no matter which language you studied,and even if you studied all the languages together.”

10 相比之下，國旗和民族主義表情符號的使用頻率不如其他類型，除非是體育賽事等大型場合。“數據顯示，至少在疫情前，人們在日常生活中更關注自己的情感狀態以及個人體驗。”他說道，“無論研究哪一種語言，數據分布都相差無幾，即使同時研究所有語言，也是如此。”

11 Even though emoji use was largely language-agnostic,Kejriwal did notice some quirks that he attributes to linguistic influence.The French-speaking regions,including Canada and France,had more analogous patterns of emoji usage to each other than to a country like Germany.Canada and India were also very alike in the ways that they use emoji.“I’m sure it has a lot to do with the fact that there are a lot of Indian residents in Canada,” he speculates.

11 盡管表情符號的使用在很大程度上與語言無關，凱吉里瓦爾還是注意到了一些跟語言相關的奇趣之處。相比像德國這樣的國家，在包括加拿大和法國在內的法語區之間，表情符號的使用模式更相似。加拿大和印度的表情符號使用方式也極為相仿。“我確定這和加拿大有許多印度移民有很大關系。”他推斷道。

12 Emoji and emoticons first entered the mainstream in the 1990s,and some dubbed them the first language of the digital world.For many,emoji added a layer of warmth when peppered into texts and other forms of digital communications.Kejriwal thinks that the boom of social media combined with the 140 character limit in Twitter really primed the stage for emoji use to explode.“If you’re only allowed 140 characters,and the emoji counts for one character,then it goes very far in expressing how you feel or what you’re doing,” he adds.“That’s why maybe for a long time from 1999 to 2008,emoji weren’t really a topic of conversation.But within the last five years,people have started studying them.”

1220 世紀90年代，表情符號和情感符號開始進入主流文化，有人稱之為數字世界的第一語言。對許多人來說，在文本和其他形式的數字通信中大量添加表情符號，可以增添些許溫情。凱吉里瓦爾認為，社交媒體的繁榮以及推特發文140 個字符的限制，為表情符號使用量的激增奠定了基礎。“如果推文只能在140 個字符內，一個表情符號占一個字符，那么表情符號能夠很好地表達你的情緒以及日常。”他補充說，“這或許就是為什么表情符號在1999年至2008年的很長時間里，都不曾真正成為話題。但最近5年，它們開始進入研究者的視線。”

13 In 2015,the laugh-cry emoji,officially known as “Face with Tears of Joy” became the first pictograph lauded as the Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year.According to Oxford University Press,it was “the ‘word’ that best reflected the ethos,mood,and preoccupations of 2015.”

13 表情符號“笑哭”的正式名稱為“含淚大笑的臉”，2015年成為第一個獲評“牛津詞典年度詞匯”的象形文字。根據牛津大學出版社的說法，它是“最能反映2015年的社會風氣、情緒和關注點的‘單詞’”。

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14 Last week,Microsoft expanded its suite of emoji.The company said in a tweet that it was introducing a new set of icons “to better reflect the world we live in.” To Kejriwal,the fact that Microsoft,Slack,and other platforms support emoji,and that the standard sets are growing,is an encouraging sign.

14 上周，微軟擴充了其表情符號系列。這家公司在推文中稱正在引入新一組表情符號，以“更好地反映我們所在的世界”。微軟、Slack 及其他平臺都支持表情符號，標準符號組正在不斷壯大。在凱吉里瓦爾看來，這是一個令人鼓舞的跡象。

15 “That to me suggests that they are very powerful and they are here to stay,” Kejriwal says.“It’s a good thing,because it allows us to be expressive,especially where we’re not that comfortable with words,and we just want to put something that’s more emotive out there.” ■

15 “在我看來，這意味著它們有著強大的生命力，而且會存在下去。”凱吉里瓦爾說，“這是個好事，因為表情符號讓我們能明確表露想法，特別是用文字無法自如表達的時候，我們只是想表達一些更有感染力的東西。” □