‘Hinglish’ users like to celebrate more than others, shows study on emojis
The insight into the feelings of digital media users comes through an analysis of half a million emojis
New Delhi: Call it the portrait of a nation in a thousand emojis but if you are a user of Hinglish—a hybrid of Hindi and English that is popular in India—on digital media, chances are you either partying or generally celebrating life.
Conversely, you could be reading.
Either way, love is probably not your thing.
The insight into the feelings of digital media users—on computers or mobile phones—comes through an analysis of half a million emojis, those ubiquitous tiny digital images such as smiley and sad faces, thumbs up and sticky tongues that have become a part of modern communication.
People using Hinglish like to celebrate more than others, said a report by Swiftkey, maker of SwiftKey keyboard apps on Tuesday. They use lots of party emojis—those colourful hats and confettis.
The report analysed emojis—the modern-day shortcut to expressing feelings and emotions—from SwiftKey Cloud data over a four-month period between October 2014 and January 2015 on both Android and iOS devices.
“The data suggests Hinglish speakers like to celebrate, read, pray and often communicate about farm animals," the report says. “Most notably, they use emojis to represent party more than any other language—anything from the cake emoji to balloons to party streamers."
“Hinglish users also enjoy some of the colourful facial expression emojis more than all other languages," it added.
The report also revealed that Hinglish speakers are fond of emojis showing body parts (eyes, nose, ears, etc)—tongue in particular. They come out on top, when it comes using the ‘winky sticky out tongue’ face (it means you’re feeling slightly wacky) and the simpler ‘sticky out tongue’ face that’s meant to show you’re not really serious.
The prayer hands emoji has been used four times more, on an average, by Hinglish users than any other language users. However, the prayer hands emoji only makes up 0.8% of their emojis, compared to an even lower 0.2% average across all languages.
“Emojis are spread by word of mouth, or in this case word of keyboard. They tend to spread within groups of users that come into verbal contact first—so a group of friends and their social network, then the wider network or country," said Catalina Hallett, language engineer at SwiftKey.
“Since they are language-independent, I suspect the use of certain emojis will spread much more quickly than language slang and will cross country boundaries much more easily."
However, Hinglish users come at the bottom across all languages when it comes to using the heart emoji.
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