Abstract
Emojis are pictographs added to messages on social media and websites. Researchers have observed that emojis representing kissing faces are often used to close instant messaging conversations. This has been interpreted as an imitation of cheek kissing, a common behavior in some cultural contexts. We analyze the use of seven types of kissing emojis in three corpora of WhatsApp chats, one from Spain (where cheek kisses in face-to-face interaction are commonplace in many situations), the other from Germany (where kisses are occasionally given), and the third from the German-speaking part of Switzerland (where cheek kisses are a common greeting between relatives and friends). To do so, we systematically categorize and compare the use of a sample of these emojis on WhatsApp. The analysis suggests that there are differences between the three corpora in the use of the kissing emojis. The emoji “face throwing a kiss” is often included in closing messages in the Spanish and Swiss-German data, while in the Federal German corpus kisses do not appear at the end of a conversation; using these emojis in openings is uncommon in all three corpora. This suggests that these emojis can exhibit cultural variation, but they do not clearly mirror face-to-face behavior.
Funding source: MCIN/AEI
Award Identifier / Grant number: FJC2018-038704-I
Funding source: University Jaume I
Award Identifier / Grant number: E-2018-15
Funding source: Swiss National Science Foundation
Award Identifier / Grant number: CRSII1_160714
About the authors
Agnese Sampietro is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of European Languages and Literature of the University Jaume I, Spain. She wrote the first dissertation on emojis in Spanish, the second worldwide (Valencia, 2016). She has a wide expertise in the pragmatics of computer-mediated communication, especially focusing on Spanish. Her work draws on different academic traditions (pragmatics, sociolinguistics, communication theory, multimodality, etc.) to explore online language, interaction, and communication.
Samuel Felder has studied German and English Linguistics and Literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and is now a PhD student at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He is currently writing his PhD thesis on intra-individual linguistic variation in WhatsApp text messaging. His main research interests include the sociolinguistics and pragmatics of (digital) written communication and the regularities of non-standard writing in regional dialects and minority languages.
Beat Siebenhaar. Following his studies at the University of Zurich, Beat Siebenhaar obtained a doctorate in German linguistics with a dissertation on “Linguistic Variation, Language Change and Attitudes”. He worked as a research assistant in Zurich, Bern, and Lausanne in the fields of German studies, Computational Linguistics, General Linguistics, and Phonetics. Since 2008 he has been Professor of German Linguistics with a focus on variation research at the University of Leipzig, Germany.
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Research funding: This work was partially supported by postdoctoral fellowship FJC2018-038704-I (funded by MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033) and travel grant E-2018-15 (University Jaume I). The Swiss National Science Foundation granted the Sinergia-project “What’s up, Switzerland?” (CRSII1_160714) from 2016 to 2020.
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