
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society Jieun Kiaer, "Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Mar 2, 2026
Jieun Kiaer, Professor of Korean linguistics at Oxford who studies digital communication, explains 'emoji speak' and why emojis vary globally. She discusses how emojis are created and adopted, Unicode and representation limits, cross-cultural misinterpretations, legal stakes, age and hierarchy effects, and where emoji-driven communication may lead next.
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Child Learned To Speak With Emoji
- Jieun Kiaer describes her younger daughter learning to communicate with emoji before writing words, using them to message an aunt in Korea.
- This personal example motivated Kiaer's research and illustrates emoji as a primary communicative mode for children.
Publishing Emoji Images Triggers Complex Copyright Issues
- Copyright and IP law complicate publishing emoji-rich research because many emoji artwork are owned by platforms or designers.
- Kiaer had to recreate images with a designer and consult IP lawyers and companies like Google, WeChat, and Kakao to avoid infringement.
Emoji Speak As A New Multimodal Register
- Kiaer coins "emoji speak" to describe multimodal, image-based communication that competes with letter-based language.
- She treats emoji as both noun and verb and includes memes and pictographic forms as part of a shifted communicative register.

