How Different Cultures Use Emojis
How we use emojis around the world differs by culture and generation in interesting ways, sometimes funny, or not.
Fritz, who’d just turned 22 thought the text he got from his boss that morning was quite funny, he knew she had a sense of humour. So he replied with a skull emoji (💀) and five minutes later was a bit surprised when the CEO texted him to come straight to her office. Part of the Gen X demographic, she thought the skull emoji meant death. To Gen Z, a skull means hilarious.
Errol had spent weeks on a complex diplomatic communication with another diplomat in the Middle East. They’d got on well and when a meeting had been agreed, he sent a fist bump (👊) to the Middle Eastern diplomate. It almost created an international incident! A fist bump in Western culture is rarely used in Middle Eastern cultures where it can take on a rather dark political meaning.
Emojis have become an integral part of our daily communications at work and in our social and family lives. While they may seem simple to us, they carry different contexts across cultures and generations. So much so that some global corporations like IBM and Microsoft have developed emoji etiquette guides for employees.
In Japanese corporations, as an example, they’ve evolved strict policies on emojis reflecting their fairly rigid hierarchical structures. Junior staff are not allowed to use emojis at all in initial communications, these must be initiated by senior staff once a relationship has become established. With clients, only company approved emoji sets can be used.
In Western cultures, the thumbs up symbol (👍) represents everything is ok or a simple statement of agreement. Try it in some Middle Eastern or Latin American cultures and you may end up insulting someone.
If we look at emojis from the perspective of structural anthropology (how cultures structure their rules, norms and behaviours) emojis take on what are called “floating signifiers”, where symbols (emojis) are less about their inherent properties (smiley face being just a smile) and more about their relationships with other symbols in a given cultural system.
Emojis also help create a sort of social “glue” in the warp and woof of digital relationships, what technically could be called “mechanical solidarity” as sociologist Emile Durkheim would call it. This is why they can vary widely in meaning across different cultures.
For example, the Western interpretation of the folded hands (🙏) is as “please” or “thank-you” whereas in Japan it may be seen as a gesture of apology and in Thai culture an official greeting mirroring the real-world “wai” gesture. In Indian culture they more often represent “namaste” or prayer.
Oh and that smiling face (😊)? For Western cultures it’s all about happiness and friendliness. In Russian cultures it’s sarcasm and irony. In many Asian cultures this is seen as far too informal for business usage.
Emojis may take on deeper subtexts within certain smaller cultural groups. In tech communities, especially startups the rocket (🚀) takes on the meaning of a successful product launch or some sort of success. A meaning that wouldn’t always be understood outside these contexts.
The meaning applied to emojis doesn’t stand still either. They are constantly shifting in meaning across culture as a whole and within corporations. For marketers this can present a significant challenge depending on the cultural complexity of their market. We also see how different generations interpret emojis. No doubt as Gen Z ages and Gen Alpha enters the workforce, they will be interpreted differently again.
What’s also interesting, okay, well for me as an anthropologist anyway, is that we’re seeing younger generations teach older ones about communications norms when it comes to emojis. This is a flip of the usual power dynamics in communications styles and norms. Typically these are handed down by older generations.
Emojis are a form of digital semiotics. In the real-world, semiotics is all about the communication of meaning through the meaning of signs or symbols. They are interpreted differently across cultural settings. With emojis, they can carry dual meanings, denotative, the literal meaning and conotative with cultural and contextual meanings. For example;
First-Order Signification (Denotative):
🌳 literally represents a tree
😊 represents a smiling face
🏠 represents a house
Second-Order Signification (Connotative):
🌳 might represent environmentalism, growth, or stability
😊 could indicate anything from genuine happiness to passive-aggression depending on context
🏠 might represent security, wealth, or “working from home” in modern contexts
To add yet more complexity to the cultural aspects of emojis, we can add in what I term as “floating signifier chains”, where the meaning of an emoji shifts not just across cultures, but also platforms.
On Twitter (x), emojis are often used with subversive or ironic meanings whereas on LinkedIn they are used more literally and professionally. On Instagram emojis more often function as aesthetic elements rather than just communication.
Emojis can transform the the meaning of text, enabling a degree of emotion that can be misinterpreted, or convey the wrong tone as well. But in a way, this makes emojis “metalingual markers” in that they are symbols that clarify how other symbols (text) can be interpreted.
So emojis are highly complex semiotic symbols since meanings can be multiple and stacked or combined in ways more sophisticated than text-based communications. We might see them in a way as similar to how Asian languages make use of symbols and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs or Norse runes. In a way, they echo ancient writing systems.
All languages are constantly evolving, some faster than others. A while back I wrote an essay on how emojis might, but likely won’t, become our first global language. This essay builds on that and shows that while they may not become a global language, emojis have been broadly adopted by most global cultures, but in the preferred way of that culture.
Human cultures view, adopt and adapt technologies in ways that make sense to them. Western societies tend to think technology adoption and adaptation is universal, but it has never been thus and unlikely ever will be. Cultural factors such as social governance, economic and political models, norms, behaviours and customs always factor in. It’s part of why we’re so interesting and wonderful.
Sometimes emojis can enable easier and faster cultural transmission, yet they can equally create confusion and inter-cultural misunderstanding. Yet they may be one of the better forms of cross-cultural communication we have. When we first work to understand one another.