Résumé:
Emoji are the greatest advancement in visual communication in the last twenty years and they have gone truly global in the recent few years. This study investigates the use of Emoji in online communication. It aims not only to highlight Emoji impact on language and in communication, but also to explore if Emoji can be considered as a language in the future. For the relevance of the study, thirty-five participants were selected from Mostaganem English department. The survey is conducted by a qualitative research method in a form of a questionnaire. The latter was distributed as online and printed papers among the participants.
Therefore, findings suggest that Emoji are widely used and that those pictographs representations are affecting language in terms of grammar and pragmatic functions. Then, they are understood and interpreted differently. After that, results displayed that Emoji share many characteristics with natural language. Through gathering the data of the research, the study has found how Emoji have evolved and been developed by those who are termed the technologically savvy youth generation, and also how necessarily crucial is the role of Emoji in visual language to fully grasp what exactly the addresser is trying to say.
