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An obscure organization that standardizes the way punctuation marks and other text are represented by computer systems has in recent years found itself at the forefront of mobile pop culture, with its power to create new emojis.

A new batch is under review, a process that takes months. But don’t call the pictorial system a language, unless you want an argument from Mark Davis, 63, a co-founder and the president of the Unicode Consortium, the group that serves as the midwife to new emojis.

Mr. Davis said there was no broadly shared way to interpret the symbols, despite their widespread use on phones and other devices.

“I can tell you, using language, I need to go get a haircut, but only if I can get there by 3 p.m., and otherwise I have to pick up the kids,” he said. “You try to express that in emoji and you get a series of symbols that people could interpret in a thousand different ways.”

In an interview last week, Mr. Davis discussed the latest group of 67 images, set for a vote at the consortium’s meeting next spring.

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The pictures include a groom in a tuxedo (there is already a bride), a Mother Christmas figure (a counterpart to the existing Santa Claus), a pregnant woman, a drooling face, a clown, a shark, an avocado and two strips of bacon.

The Unicode Consortium is sometimes labeled “mysterious” (as in a recent post from New York magazine) but Mr. Davis said there was nothing shadowy about it. Its work is largely transparent, and information about its history, members and processes are included on its website.

The group includes executives from Apple, Google, Facebook and other technology giants. Mr. Davis is chief internationalization architect at Google. The group meets quarterly; at a meeting in May, they will vote on whether to formally induct the 67 new emojis.


Unicode was started in the late 1980s to develop a standardized code for text characters. It used to be that different computers could not easily talk to one another because they used different codes for the same letters.

To solve that problem, Unicode takes every letter, number, symbol and punctuation mark that it deems worthy and assigns each — including emojis — a specific number that a computer will recognize.

Some of these modern hieroglyphics have prompted debate. Sets of default emojis that included only white skin tones prompted Unicode to release more diverse characters last year. And one image in the latest group has prompted protest: The British gun control group Infer Trust has spoken out against a proposal for a rifle emoji.

And, whatever Mr. Davis thinks, some experts are not quite as sure that emojis do not represent the beginnings of a new language.

Take Colin Rothfels, who works for a keyboard company. His job title? “Emoji grammarian.”

“We’ve had this vocabulary kind of dropped on us and different kinds of people are finding different ways to use it,” Mr. Rothfels said. “Obviously it’s a very limited language, if you want to call it a language.”


Mr. Davis concedes that emojis could one day evolve into something more.

“It’s not a language, but conceivably, it could develop into one, like Chinese did,” he said. “Pictures can acquire a particular meaning in a particular culture. I’ll mention the infamous eggplant emoji, which has gotten to have a particular meaning in American culture, one which is not shared in a lot of cultures.” (Some texters in the United States are using the fruit as a phallus emoji.)

Tyler Schnoebelen, who has a doctorate from Stanford in linguistics and is something of an emoji specialist, says that while the symbols are not technically a language, they do function as a sort of written equivalent of body language.

“In text, you’re less expressive if you don’t have emojis,” he said. “And that’s a very meaningful and emotional thing that they make you feel like you can express your personal style.”

Before the 67 new emojis can be the building blocks of language or personal style though, they will have to be made official.

Mr. Davis said that all but one of the last group of emojis to be subjected to a vote were inducted into the official hieroglyphic system.

In deciding which emojis to add, the Unicode Consortium considers factors including compatibility (if a pictorial symbol in broad use has not been translated into Unicode), and frequency of use (whether people will be interested in using a certain picture often enough to justify its existence).

Another factor is “completeness.” For instance, at one point, the group added a mosque, a synagogue and a generic place of worship to complement the Christian church symbol that was already included.

Living people, deities and logos or symbols that are “legally encumbered,” such as others’ intellectual property, are not included.


The group of potential new emojis includes a large number of sports icons. That was to accommodate people texting during the next Olympics.

“Some people are bothered by the inclusion of the rifle as a candidate,” Mr. Davis said. “But the reason that’s included is because shooting is an Olympic sport.”

After the vote in May, a final version including approved new emojis will come out in June.

But that does not mean people will immediately be able to send texts depicting sharks, bacon and Mother Christmas.

“These don’t magically appear once we approve them,” Mr. Davis. said. “Manufacturers have to put them on their phones. But once they are approved in the May meeting, then vendors will typically go ahead and start working on them.”

His eagerness to use one symbol suggested that he was confident that at least that one is guaranteed to win approval from vendors.

“I’ll tell you what I think I’m going to use the most often once it’s available,” he said. “The rolling eyes emoji.”

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