About Emojilingo

Consisting today in over three thousand pictograms and symbols, and regularly updated by Unicode Consortium, the emoji international catalogue contains signs for facial expressions (smileys) and for human gestures, portraits of people, plants and animals, reproductions of food and objects for everyday activities and sports, symbols of travel and places, flags, numbers, geometrical forms.

Whereas the visual content seems to provide an encyclopaedic list with a universal status, ideally able to signify language-independent meanings, the interpretation of emojis is, on the contrary, heavily arbitrary, subject to ambiguities and differences due to linguistic and cultural specificities.

Among the projects aiming at developing an emoji based language to express meanings through translation in emoji of a literary text (the most popular, Emoji Dick), Emojitaliano was created specifically to counteract the natural polysemy of emojis by a social community (#scritturebrevi #emojitaliano), devoted to the experimental crowdsourcing construction of an international emoji code.

Born with the translation of Collodi’s Pinocchio, The Story of a Puppet, the structure and glossary of Emojitaliano have been later usefully reapplied for the translation of texts of different genres such as the technical declaratory prose of the Italian Constitution, the Manifesto of non-hostile communication, the narrative prose of moral tales (i.e. The Wolf and the Lamb), Dante’s allegorical poetry of The Comedy, Giacomo Leopardi’s lyrical poem L’infinito.

Emojitaliano is based on the assessment of conventional meanings, capable of guaranteeing the sharing of sense by means of intersemiotic translation.

Emojitaliano consists in an original project providing a grammatical structure and a shared vocabulary using emoji as a pivot language, that is a constructed language in emoji which has become the basis for the present project: Emojilingo.

The aim of the project includes linguistic simplification and - through a chain translation method - the possibility of reproducing a text in emoji that will be comprehensible and readable in any language of the world.

The iconic property of emoji, together with the coded glossary and grammar, makes Emojitaliano a unique tool for communicative accessibility and for multilingual and language (L1 and L2) teaching.