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In hundreds of years,emojicould become the digital cave artof our times.At least that’s what Mayank Kejriwal,a research assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California,speculates.His latest research studying emoji usage on Twitter is spurring him to think about whether our collective real-time behavior on social media can capture and reveal something about the present human condition.

数百年后，表情符号或将成为我们这个时代的数字洞穴艺术。至少南加州大学工业与系统工程系的研究助理教授马扬克·凯吉里瓦尔如此推断。他最近研究了推特上的表情符号使用情况，由此激发进一步思考，即我们在社交媒体的实时集体行为能否表达和揭示人类的某些现状。

2 “The single-most interesting insight that came out [of the study] was that people really are very universal when it comes to emoji usage,” he says.“No matter what language you look at,you see a very clear trend emerging.”

2 凯吉里瓦尔指出：“（研究）最为有趣的发现是，人们在表情符号的使用上确实很富共性。无论是哪种语言，都显现出非常清晰的趋势。”

3 He and his team analyzed over 1.5 billion public tweets from October 2016 to determine how Twitter users from all over the globe were employing emoji in their social communications.Then,they isolated the tweets that were GPSenabledand scoured the metadatato find language information.

3 他和团队分析了2016年10月以来超过15 亿条公开推文，以确定全球推特用户如何在社交中使用表情符号。随后，他们抽取了附有定位信息的推文，在元数据中搜寻语言信息。

4 “We picked a period well in the prepandemic because we wanted to study very general trends,not event-specific like after an election,” he explains.The team wanted to examine a time before TikTok,Snapchat,and other platforms emerged—a time in which the majority of social media users were concentrated on Twitter.“We tried to figure out which emoji were popular,” he says.“Is there a language difference,country difference,or are they universal? How globalized are we in the emoji landscape?”

4 “我们想研究非常普遍的趋势，而非诸如大选后这种特定的趋势，因此选定的时间段早在疫情之前。”他解释道。他们团队想要考察大多数社交媒体用户都集中在推特的时期，即抖音国际版、色拉布等平台尚未崭露头角的时期。“我们想找出流行的表情符号。”他说，“这些表情符号是否会因为推主语言和国别不同而千差万别？抑或如出一辙？表情符号领域的全球化程度有多高？”

The most popular kinds of emoji

最受欢迎的表情符号

5 Indeed,they found that people were using emoji in a similar fashion regardless of nationality or language.The most popular type of emoji everywhere are those that depict emotions (joy,sadness,anger),with the laugh-cry face topping the charts as the single-most popular emoji.Smiling faces and hearts are very well-loved too.“These tend to be more emotive.They either express an opinion or an emotional state.That suggests that we are emotional creatures,” says Kejriwal.

5 他们果然发现，无论国别或语言为何，人们使用表情符号的方式类似。世界上最受欢迎的表情符号类型是情感表达类（高兴、悲伤、生气），其中“笑哭”的表情荣登榜首，成为最流行的表情符号。“微笑脸”和“爱心”也很受欢迎。“这些表情符号都更情绪化，要么表达观点，要么表现情感状态。这说明我们是感性生物。”凯吉里瓦尔说道。

6 Western nations appeared to favor smiling faces more,and most countries had relatively comparable proportions of hearts to smiley faces,except for the Middle East,where “the blue heart is very popular,” he says.“The normal red heart was very popular in South American countries,including Brazil.”

6 西方国家似乎更喜欢微笑脸，除中东地区外的大多数国家，爱心和笑脸的使用比例大致相当。“蓝色爱心在中东很受欢迎。”他说道，“常见的红色爱心在包括巴西在内的南美洲国家非常流行。”

7 Even though it was not part of the study,from what Kejriwal has observed,many responses he sees to memeson the internet tend to contain more emoji.“The really good memes have an emotional impact,so it kind of goes to the original claim,that when there’s an emotional impact,emoji are used more,words are used less often,” he says.“Even just thinking about the words takes energy.It’s just easier to send off an emoji.”

7 尽管不在研究之列，但凯吉里瓦尔观察发现，许多网友回复网络爆红内容时往往会使用更多表情符号。“真正精彩的网络爆红内容都能感染人的情绪，这多少印证了此前的观点，即有情感效应时，表情符号的使用频率会更高，文字的使用频率则较低。”他说，“仅是构思文字表达也要费神，发送表情符号则轻而易举。”

Emoji for conveying a sense of place

传达地域感的表情符号

8 The experiential emoji populate the middle of the rankings.They’re not as popular as the symbols that show an emotion,but are still used moderately.These are the food symbols and the activity symbols (like football,rugby,or beach balls).Sometimes,which specific experiential emoji were popular was location or event-dependent.Experiences can also include holidays that are celebrated worldwide.For example,the Halloween emoji was very popular in October in the US,but also in Canada and Australia.

8 体验型表情符号排在受欢迎榜单的中间位置。它们不像情感表达类符号一样风靡，但仍有不少人使用。这些表情符号有关食物和活动（例如足球、橄榄球或沙滩球）。有时，哪些特定的体验型表情符号能够风行与地点或事件息息相关。这些体验包括全世界都庆祝的节日。如每年10月，有关万圣节的表情符号不仅会在美国盛行，在加拿大和澳大利亚亦会形成潮流。

9 “We did find that in the vacation places,the emoji [usage] was more.If you had coastal cities,people tended to tweet more,and these [tweets] also had more emoji.For example,in Australia’s coastal cities,all the beachrelated emoji were always there.And if you had great weather in coastal cities,you would see much more diversity of emoji,” Kejriwal says.“In the Scandinavian countries,we didn’t find that much diversity of emoji usage.They tended to be clustered around a small set of emoji.”

9 “的确，我们发现，在度假胜地，表情符号（的使用频率）更高。身处海滨城市的人往往发更多推文，这些（推文）也包含更多的表情符号。例如，在澳大利亚的沿海城市，总能发现所有与海滩有关的表情符号。如果这些沿海城市恰逢好天气，你看到的表情符号要丰富得多。”凯吉里瓦尔说，“我们没在斯堪的纳维亚半岛国家的用户推文中找到如此丰富多彩的表情符号，这些国家偏爱某一小部分符号。”

10 Comparatively,flags and the nationalistic symbols were not used as much as other types of emoji,except at spectacles such as sporting events.“What the data showed us is that in their dayto-day lives,people are more focused on their emotional states and their experiences,at least pre-pandemic,” he says.“The distribution was very similar,no matter which language you studied,and even if you studied all the languages together.”

10 相比之下，国旗和民族主义表情符号的使用频率不如其他类型，除非是体育赛事等大型场合。“数据显示，至少在疫情前，人们在日常生活中更关注自己的情感状态以及个人体验。”他说道，“无论研究哪一种语言，数据分布都相差无几，即使同时研究所有语言，也是如此。”

11 Even though emoji use was largely language-agnostic,Kejriwal did notice some quirks that he attributes to linguistic influence.The French-speaking regions,including Canada and France,had more analogous patterns of emoji usage to each other than to a country like Germany.Canada and India were also very alike in the ways that they use emoji.“I’m sure it has a lot to do with the fact that there are a lot of Indian residents in Canada,” he speculates.

11 尽管表情符号的使用在很大程度上与语言无关，凯吉里瓦尔还是注意到了一些跟语言相关的奇趣之处。相比像德国这样的国家，在包括加拿大和法国在内的法语区之间，表情符号的使用模式更相似。加拿大和印度的表情符号使用方式也极为相仿。“我确定这和加拿大有许多印度移民有很大关系。”他推断道。

12 Emoji and emoticons first entered the mainstream in the 1990s,and some dubbed them the first language of the digital world.For many,emoji added a layer of warmth when peppered into texts and other forms of digital communications.Kejriwal thinks that the boom of social media combined with the 140 character limit in Twitter really primed the stage for emoji use to explode.“If you’re only allowed 140 characters,and the emoji counts for one character,then it goes very far in expressing how you feel or what you’re doing,” he adds.“That’s why maybe for a long time from 1999 to 2008,emoji weren’t really a topic of conversation.But within the last five years,people have started studying them.”

1220 世纪90年代，表情符号和情感符号开始进入主流文化，有人称之为数字世界的第一语言。对许多人来说，在文本和其他形式的数字通信中大量添加表情符号，可以增添些许温情。凯吉里瓦尔认为，社交媒体的繁荣以及推特发文140 个字符的限制，为表情符号使用量的激增奠定了基础。“如果推文只能在140 个字符内，一个表情符号占一个字符，那么表情符号能够很好地表达你的情绪以及日常。”他补充说，“这或许就是为什么表情符号在1999年至2008年的很长时间里，都不曾真正成为话题。但最近5年，它们开始进入研究者的视线。”

13 In 2015,the laugh-cry emoji,officially known as “Face with Tears of Joy” became the first pictograph lauded as the Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year.According to Oxford University Press,it was “the ‘word’ that best reflected the ethos,mood,and preoccupations of 2015.”

13 表情符号“笑哭”的正式名称为“含泪大笑的脸”，2015年成为第一个获评“牛津词典年度词汇”的象形文字。根据牛津大学出版社的说法，它是“最能反映2015年的社会风气、情绪和关注点的‘单词’”。

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14 Last week,Microsoft expanded its suite of emoji.The company said in a tweet that it was introducing a new set of icons “to better reflect the world we live in.” To Kejriwal,the fact that Microsoft,Slack,and other platforms support emoji,and that the standard sets are growing,is an encouraging sign.

14 上周，微软扩充了其表情符号系列。这家公司在推文中称正在引入新一组表情符号，以“更好地反映我们所在的世界”。微软、Slack 及其他平台都支持表情符号，标准符号组正在不断壮大。在凯吉里瓦尔看来，这是一个令人鼓舞的迹象。

15 “That to me suggests that they are very powerful and they are here to stay,” Kejriwal says.“It’s a good thing,because it allows us to be expressive,especially where we’re not that comfortable with words,and we just want to put something that’s more emotive out there.” ■

15 “在我看来，这意味着它们有着强大的生命力，而且会存在下去。”凯吉里瓦尔说，“这是个好事，因为表情符号让我们能明确表露想法，特别是用文字无法自如表达的时候，我们只是想表达一些更有感染力的东西。” □