A review by Géza Balázs:

Researchers of the 20th century media, the 20-21st century informational society, the world of internet and mobile communication observed that we are about to take an ‘iconical turn’. A clearly observable and very practical representative of this turn is the emoticon (smiley, smile icon, emotion icon or emotional iconization). Emoticons, however, have deep roots in cultural history. Initiating pictorial marks (icons) such as in musical transcription has been a frequently mentioned idea in the history of literacy. What the intellectual class of the era (who had a role in shaping the writing tradition) had not accepted then, the internet and SMS-users initiated in a spontaneous way at the end of the 20th century.

Mobile companies have already published emoticon dictionaries that contain mixtures of individual ideas (idiolects) and commonly accepted forms (sociolects). Recently, however, a Hungarian study has been published on the topic that is unparalleled in the international and Hungarian semiotic studies as well as in the history of literacy and graphemes. Emoticons - Expressing emotions in the internet communication was written by two young linguists, Zoltán Bódi and Ágnes Veszelszki, and was published by the Hungarian Association for Semiotic Studies as a new member in its series of semiotic publications.

The first icon (smile icon) was created well before the digital literacy. The smiling face (the smiley) was registered as a trademark by its inventor Franklin Loufrani in 1968. Later on it appeared on T-shirts, mugs and other items, while in the beginning of the 1990s the smiley became the symbol of acid house music and culture. Its scope of use broadened owing to the digital literacy and culture, which featured an inventive application of the existent graphemes, keyboard characters and later on image files. Emoticons, therefore, stem from the graphemes of primary literacy but have become the marks of secondary literacy.

The first emoticon, i.e. the smiley, was consisted of real graphemes (more precisely punctuation marks): a colon and a bracket. Its curiosity is that if rotated 90 degrees clockwise, the colon comes atop and the bracket below, thus depicting the two eyes and an ear-to-ear smile. Clearly, this emoticon is the iconical (pictorial) sign of the smile, which is one of the most important signs in the emotional, mimical communication of man. Furthermore, there are more complex iconical forms, like the figurative image of the flower (which is an icon, because yet recognisable) : @-}- By making it stand, indeed, it is a flower! Moreover, with the very same ‘technique’, it is possible to coin up symbolical (lingual) messages. These icons (might as well be called emoticon-symbols) are, however, less frequent phenomena. As mentioned above, Hungarian mobile companies have published smaller emoticon (and SMS-) dictionaries featuring symbols like: %-6 - ‘braindead’ (thoroughly exhausted), :?) - user is a philosopher, 00 - ‘a guy is dancing attendance on you’, etc. Contrary to emoticons these symbols have not spread internationally.

With the development of technology, these emoticons could change shape, become small pictures and be animated, this way evolving to dynamic emoticons or animoticons (labels first used in the Hungarian terminology). With the naming of the animated, dynamic emoticons, we could retrospectively name the unanimated, motionless emoticons as well: these are the static emoticons. The structural constituents of dynamic emoticons are not any more just colons, hyphens and brackets, but lively colourful animated image files (gif or png formatted image files). The majority of these emoticons continue to depict facial expressions but we can come across e.g.: small animals as well.

The outstanding semiotic curiosity of the phenomenon is that the alphabetic writing system, which is considered to be highly developed, revisited an earlier stage in the history of literacy, i.e. the hieroglyph writing. Since a hieroglyph reflects an identifiable image, it can be regarded as a pictogramic icon or symbol. Another curiosity of the phenomenon is that the idea of completing the alphabet with such symbols turned up from time to time in the history of literacy. In fact the exclamation mark (!), the question mark (?) with its curve expressing doubt or the three dots (…) signifying interruption may also be considered as emoticons. What our predecessors had refused to do, the secondary literacy (also Hungarian terminology) has done in a spontaneous, speech-like way that uses the latest technological means of communication but keeps to the folklore traditions nevertheless. Secondary literacy not only began to use and spread its new symbols, but it also shifts them to the primary literacy (official literacy with standard forms and generally accepted system of rules).

Emoticon lexicons give thematic classifications of these symbols: e.g. happiness, sadness, amusement, embarrassment, love, actions, outlook, personal characteristics, carousal, eating, holiday, etc. According to the researches of Zoltán Bódi, emoticons can signify the following states of mind: aggression, pleasure, impatience, discontentment, happiness, sadness, sarcasm. After describing the visual characteristics of dynamic emoticons, Ágnes Veszelszki gives a thematic and functional classification: emotions, general activities, sexuality - eroticism, humour, human relations and holidays, figures and punctuation marks. The book contains an emoticon dictionary featuring the frequency rate of each item and a colourful presentation of dynamic emoticons on four pages. The collection of these small movies is available in motion on the supplementary CD.

Zoltán Bódi carried out quantitative surveys on static emotions. For instance he had examined the average smiley frequency, which showed that emoticons were missing from the half of the examined texts, but where they appear, people use more of them and more often. It is also interesting to see how the participants of the surveys express their passion. According to the corpus: 30-30% express themselves textually or via smileys, 16% by overusing exclamation marks and 11-11% by ‘writing with the caps lock on’ or using a mixture of texts and marks. However, 94 out of 100 uses smiley to express pleasure, 96 to express happiness and 97 to sadness.

Beside demonstrating them, Zoltán Bódi also gives a semantic and syntactic description of the static emoticons. The semantic description highlights the manner of expressing emotions, while the syntactic description covers the realisation (and statistics) of the sign variations. The above mentioned ‘sadness icon’, for example, occurs in the following variation (in order of frequency, from the most to the least common): :(( :((( :o( :((((( ending in: ;-(

Ágnes Veszelszki had also carried out an empirical survey on dynamic (animated) emoticons used in MSN Messenger program. She examines the colour and size of emoticonism the occurring items, accessories, activities (e.g. hygiene, eating, entertainment, using the computer, heart). In addition, there are dynamic emoticons supplied with speech bubbles or banners (they call them textual emoticons). The animated emoticons often contain comic-like exaggerations (the smiley’s eyes bulge, his hair stands on end, etc.). Naturally, these activity emoticons present stories (narratives) like getting prepared to a date.

The emoticon dictionary included in the book, list the emoticons in the thematic order of expressing emotions, which is followed by a four-page-presentation of the dynamic emoticons (series of pictures). Evidently, the world of emoticons constantly changes and improves similarly to the living language and folklore, so, the collection covers only the period of time from approximately 1996 to 2006. In a decade’s time we can count on a subsequent ‘leap’ in our writing tradition, and further chapters may be added to the dictionary.

In fact, what this unparalleled publication discovers and describes, is a novel manner of expressing ourselves. With a bit of exaggeration: it documents the rebirth and extension of an old communicational form in new environment.

English translation: Levente Nagy