Emoji fanatics will be excited to hear that a fresh batch of picture symbols are on their way.
Unicode has announced that 38 new emojis (not pictured), including a drooling face, pregnant woman and avocado, will arrive with update 9.0. However, you’ll have to wait a year before being able to use them, since they’re expected to be released in June 2016.
Explaining its selection policy, Unicode, the standardised provider of emojis and encoding, stated: “Symbols are considered for incorporation… for reasons such as compatibility usage, popular requests from online communities, and filling the gaps in the existing set of Unicode emoji.”
The inbound selfie emoji, which shows a hand holding a front-facing phone, is expected to be one of the most popular additions. In its accompanying notes, Unicode suggested “expected usage is high.”
The company also says that some characters have been created with the specific intention of addressing the huge problem of “unpaired gender specific emoji.” In short, there’ll be a prince to join the existing princess, as well as a Mother Christmas.
However, some emojis required a little more thought.
“For bird emoji specifically, Cornell University Lab of Ornithology was consulted,” according to Unicode. “The list of Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology top desired bird emoji are (in order): Dove, Owl, Chicken, Eagle, Crow, Crane, Stork, Peacock, Robin or bluebird, Hummingbird, Duck, Pheasant, Magpie, Hawk, Turkey.”
The world has gone nuts for emojis, with Apple recently creating multi-cultural emojis and Instagram allowing users to hashtag them.
Even more incredibly, emoji has been hailed as the world fastest-growing language. Bangor University’s Professor Vyv Evans says it humbles ancient forms of communication, including the mighty hieroglyphic.
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What’s the world coming to?
Earlier this week, actor Simon Pegg faced a backlash after claiming that society is being infantilised, referencing superhero movies and comics. “I look at society and think we’ve been infantilised by our own taste,” he said in an interview with Radio Times. “We’re consuming very childish things.”
Sounds about right.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
