Emoji is today, incontrovertibly the world’s first truly universal form of communication.

Experts estimate that around 1.35 billion people speak English, 1.1 billion Mandarin (Chinese), 543 million Spanish, 274 million Arabic, 267 million French and 258 million Russian (those are the UN’s six official languages; about 572 million also speak Hindi, and 210 million Bengali) and yet on any given day over 3 billion people communicate with over 10 billion emojis!

Although there’s a consensus that modern emojis originated in Japan during the late 1990s, today there are over 3,633 globally-recognized emojis. But one might ask whether emojis are organized enough to constitute a language or whether a pictogram system with no spoken element whose most used character is a happy face with tears of joy should actually be regarded as a “language”!

What about the ability to translate emoji into an established spoken or written language? This becomes a little more difficult, but again not altogether unique. Anyone familiar with pictogram languages recognizes the complexity of translating a pictogram thought into a word or a written group of words and that such a translation may not perfectly capture the original thought behind the pictogram. Sometimes a pictogram requires one or more sentences to translate. On the other hand, it is sometimes difficult to translate phrases, idioms and metaphors between languages that use identical Roman characters, so converting emojis into existing written languages, while complicated, is nothing altogether new.

The main language problem with and a strength of the current emoji “alphabet” is that it expresses concepts, actions, people, places and ideas that are common to everyday human conduct. While some of the roughly 3,600 “official” emojis are exotic, the vast majority would be easily recognized by almost any modern adult with a basic education anywhere. Some efforts have been made to combine recognized emoji into “emoji sentences” that reflect more complex thoughts, but these lack recognitions and rarely — if ever — deal with law, science, literature, policies, and other more complicated topics.

There is no spoken form of emoji, making it fundamentally different from any of the six UN official languages. However, this is not different from the sign languages in international use: there is no spoken format. With the same warnings for all translations noted - emoji — like sign languages — can be translated and then converted into spoken languages and vice versa.

Summing up, the world is clearly not yet ready for emojis to be considered as a language, much less an official language, and emojis are not yet ready for the complexities of the world. Involved legal, scientific, military and economic thoughts cannot yet be expressed in emoji, much less then translated into recognized languages. Nonetheless, the day will likely come when industry-government collaboration along with artificial intelligence will make it possible to fully communicate through emoji “sentences.” Their universality gives emojis a unique strength. When this happens, we may see emojis recognized as a language — and it may perhaps even become “official.”