Emojis May Now Be The New Lingo Of Instagram Users

If you are one of those who think that the English language is doomed thanks to Internet acronyms (lol, smh), text speak, and even leet speak, now you have another new reason to lament the death of English as we know it -- emojis.

Instagram, the phenomenally popular photo sharing social media platform, has just released its analysis on the use of emojis, and its findings indicate that, yes, emojis are taking over Instagram. Based on its analysis, Instagram found out that nearly half of all comments made on Instagram now consist of at least one emoji.

For Internetphobes, emojis are pictograms, or quite simply, small pictures, that can be utilized in lieu of standard text. Users nowadays mostly use emojis when text messaging or when posting or commenting online on social media, website forums, and blogs. The use of emojis first dawned on users of the iOS platform back in 2011. A year later, Android users similarly got emoji-capable features on their devices, and by the time 2013 arrived, an emoji translation version of Herman Meville's classic novel Moby Dick hit the interwebs.

Fast forwarding to the here and now, Instagram now considers emojis as an almost universal mode of expression for any user regardless of nationality. Indeed, the rampant use of emojis is not only limited to English speaking users, but also for other users from non-English speaking regions as well. As a matter of fact, Instagram's analysis shows that Finland is the most emoji-loving country in the world, followed by France. 

Any user, no matter what nationality, certainly finds pictograms more convenient to express specific emotions. A crying smiley is definitely easier to understand compared to lol or rofl which still rely on letters from the English alphabet -- for instance, if you send a facepalm emoji to somebody that is Japanese, he would get the message even if he is not familiar with English language characters.

According to Instagram's analysis, the most popular emoji (so far on Instagram) is the crying with laughter smiley face emoji, followed by the smiley face with love heart eyes emoji. On third place is the simple red love heart.

The timing of Instagram's analysis of the use of emojis is just right. Its mobile app now lets users hashtag emojis, and even search for Instagram posts through those cute smileys. Not all of the emojis can be hashtagged, however -- for example, the very popular purple eggplant emoji can not be hashtagged because using this emoji does not actually represent actual eggplants.