Emojis: Langue or Parole?

The phenomenon of emojis has had many implications for the future course of writing, literacy, communications, and the nature of representation itself. This paper looks at the implications of emoji use through the filter of Saussurean semiotics and through the lens of theories of visuality, which claim that visual writing is having radical effects on literacy and cognition. The historical background to the rise of visual writing is used as a backdrop to the semiotic analysis of the emoji phenomenon. The way we read and write messages today with visual elements such as emoji may indicate a radical shift away from a linear mode of processing information, as imprinted in alphabetic forms of writing, toward a more holistic and imaginative mode. However, because emoji usage and creativity depend on specific technologies, it remains to be seen if such writing can survive as technologies change. The main argument in this paper is that emojis are more part of parole than they are a separate langue, but they nonetheless reveal changes that the latter is undergoing in an age of digital multimodal communication.