The “Face with Tears of Joy” Emoji. A Socio-semiotic and Multimodal Insight into a Japan-American Mash Up

HERMES è stata aggiunta all'elenco delle riviste di fascia A (Area 10/L1) pubblicato in data 9 marzo 2017. ABSTRACT: The blog site of the Oxford Dictionaries features a post dated November 16 2015, which announces that, “for the first time ever”, their “Word of the Year” is not a word, but a pictograph: the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji. The term emoji, which is a loanword from Japanese, identifies “a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication” (OED 2015). The sign was chosen since it is the item that “best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015”. Adopting a socio-semiotic multimodal approach, the paper aims at decoding the many semantic and semiotic layers of the 2015 “Word of the Year”. In detail, the author focuses on the concept of translation as “transduction” (Kress 1997), to map the history of this ‘pictographic word’ from language to language, from culture to culture, from niche discursive communities to the global scenario. Indeed, the author maintains that this ‘pictographic word’ is to be seen as a marker of the mashing up of Japanese and American cultures in the discursive practices of geek communities, now gone mainstream thanks to the spreading of digital discourse.