How Emoji Are Changing Digital Communication Worldwide: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Generational Differences in Emoji Interpretations

Written computer-mediated communication is highly multimodal nowadays: visuals such as emoji have become indispensable – a staggering 10 billion emojis are sent daily across the world. Yet there is no collective consensus on how to interpret emoji: they can have different meanings depending on the context and can gain additional meanings – especially among younger generations, or digital natives. The current study explores how the demographic factors of linguaculture and age group affect emoji interpretations. In an online survey, participants of two linguacultures (Chinese, N = 68 vs. Dutch, N = 61) and two generations (Gen Z, N = 68 vs. Baby Boomers or older, N = 61) gave their interpretations of a selection of 25 emoji (😂😋😤😬😅😪🙂🤗😏😒😉🤙🙏👌🙌👍🙆‍♀️🙇‍♀️🤦‍♀️💁‍♀️🍒🍆🍑💀🐍, presented in random order). The corpus was manually coded; a subset was double-coded for computing intercoder reliability. For facial and gestural emoji, responses were coded as conventional (as based on meanings listed on Emojipedia), unconventional, or no interpretation; for other emoji, including food and objects, responses were coded as literal (denotative/primary), figurative (connotative/secondary), unconventional, or no interpretation. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed significant differences in emoji interpretations between linguacultures and generations. One particularly interesting finding was the use of homophonic emoji meanings among Chinese participants (cf. phonetic metaphors; Zhou, 2023). For example, the peach emoji (🍑, tao zi in Chinese) could also be interpreted as “naughty” (tao qi), “escape” (tao pao), or “get lucky in love” (tao hua yun). Our results contribute to understanding emoji interpretations across linguacultures and generations, and uncover the phenomenon of homophonic emoji neologisms in Chinese online language. This study has implications for intercultural and intergenerational digital communication: we need to be mindful of our interlocutor’s or intended audience’s ‘emoji literacy’ (Verheijen & Mauro, 2025), which tends to differ among generations, as well as of their linguacultural frame of reference.

References

“60 Statistics on Emojis for 2025.” Sixth City Marketing. https://www.sixthcitymarketing.com/emoji-statistics/

Emojipedia. https://emojipedia.org/

Verheijen, L., & T. Mauro (2025). Emoji use by children and adults: An exploratory corpus study. Research in Corpus Linguistics, 13(1), 57-85.

Zhou, J. (2023). Phonetic metaphor of Chinese emojis: An approach of neologism formation. In L. Cotgrove, L. Herzberg, H. Lüngen, I. Pisetta (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities (pp. 190-193). Mannheim: Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache.