Sometimes they laugh, sometimes they shed tears, sometimes they look grim – we’re talking about emojis. In 2024 alone, 108 new ones were added, but what do they actually mean? This is not always clear to German users, as linguists have now discovered in a study.
3,782 – that’s how many emojis were available to Internet users in 2024, according to the Unicode Consortium, which ensures a uniform standard for text types and emojis. They have become an indispensable part of everyday communication via messenger apps such as WhatsApp or Telegram, but also in other social networks such as Instagram. It’s difficult to choose – because the meaning of each icon is actually precisely defined. Actually.
Because what the grinning cat face really means is a mystery to many. What German-speaking users associate with the colorful smiley faces was researched by Professor Dr. Tatjana Scheffler, a linguist at the Ruhr University Bochum, and Dr. Ivan Nenchev from the Charité University Medicine in Berlin in a recent study. They published their results in the specialist journal “Behaviour Research MethodsLink opens in a new tab” published.
Before we reveal the emoji psychology of German chatters, there is one more question for you:
Emojis: symbols with diverse meanings
Many of the pictographs actually originated in Japan. However, facial expressions and gestures are often interpreted differently or have different connotations culturally than in Western Europe, for example. It is therefore no surprise that many of the emojis are now used by Germans in a completely different way than originally intended. In order to find out what meanings German-speaking Internet users attribute to the chat symbols and when they use them, the research duo showed 153 participants in an online survey all 107 facial emojis available at the time of the study. Abstract emojis such as the poop, hand and object emojis were not analyzed.
On a scale with a slider, the subjects indicated how familiar the emoji was to them, how clear they felt its meaning was, how complex its visual representation was, as well as how they perceived its emotionality and intensity. In addition, the researchers asked the participants to describe the meaning of the respective emojis using a maximum of three terms. “We analyzed these descriptions using computational linguistic methods,” explains Tatjana Scheffler in a Press release.
This revealed a clear difference between theory and practice, as Ivan Nenchev explains: “Emojis are defined in Unicode, but their use and interpretation in practice differs greatly from the meanings listed there.” While some emojis have only one main meaning – the tearful laughing face, for example, means “funny” or “laughing” – others have several different meanings. Generational differences also came to light.
Sexy or angry? The true meaning of emojis
For example, the slightly smiling face is described by the study participants as both friendly and passive-aggressive. The majority of respondents described the laughing devil with horns as evil, but some also described it as sexy, ironic, cheeky or as being used in contexts where someone is making a plan. According to the Unicode Consortium, the emoji originally stands for being angry.
Some emojis that at first glance seem unrelated, such as the “skull”, the “smiling face” and the “frowning face”, are nevertheless used in very similar chat contexts. Most emojis are also rarely associated with actual words in the German language. Rather, many are based on so-called non-words: laughing expressions such as “haha” or “hihihi” or hashtags such as the camera emoji for “#pictureoftheday”. Emojis, the scientists conclude in their study, symbolize things that are difficult to put into words.
An emoji is used particularly frequently in German-speaking countries
In addition to the individual meaning attribution of the study participants, the researchers also determined how often individual emojis were used. For this purpose, over 280 million German-language tweets from 2022 were evaluated using computer linguistics. A smaller data set of WhatsApp conversations, the most used messenger in Germany, also provided information about which emojis were the favorites in private messages. It was shown that the most frequently used emoji is the tearful laughing face, followed by the laughing face and the winking smiley. The horrified face was used least frequently, followed by the emojis “face in clouds” and “face with dotted line”.
The comparison between this data and the information provided by participants in the online survey showed that the more well-known an emoji was, the more often it was used. The greater familiarity of emojis was also associated with a higher positive emotional evaluation and clarity. The situation is different with complex, less clear emojis. “Negative emojis are also more emotionally intense than positive ones,” says study author Tatjana Scheffler. This could be because positive emojis are used more often in chats and wear out more quickly, the researchers suspect.
From a friendly smile to inner emptiness
In addition, the researchers add, the ascribed meaning of emojis can change over time, similar to words. This is what happened with the eggplant, which is now more of a phallic symbol, but also with the smiling smiley, which for Generation Z means something like inner emptiness. The face with a zipper as a mouth was the most unclear to German-speaking users – in the survey, it received the most different meanings. These ranged from “keep a secret” to “shut up” to “speechless”.
We are now too – but we would still be happy if you told us your favorite emoji in the comments and what you think it means!
