Emojis are universal. No matter what language the person you're communicating with speaks, he or she will most likely understand what you're saying with a red frowny face or a thumbs up.
However, that doesn't mean everyone everywhere has the same emoji preferences. I, for one, think that smiling pile of poop emoji is kind of gross, whereas many people love to use it, either genuinely or ironically. Your background influences how you think and act, so why wouldn't your culture have an effect on the types of emojis you use?
That turns out to be the case, according to a new report from SwiftKey, the company behind the keyboard app for iOS and Android devices of the same name. SwiftKey looked at more than one billion pieces of emoji data to see which emojis were the most popular among users of various languages and regions around the world.
The United States leads in the use of the skull and fire emoji, although Canadian English speakers are actually the most violent in their emoji use. The U.S. is also No.1 in its usage of the birthday cake, pizza slice and eggplant emoji. And Americans are probably using that last one for the exact reason you think. Americans also led in usage of LGBT-themed emoji, which has got to restore your faith in humanity a little bit.
While not-so-nice emojis like knives, guns and bombs do exist, emoji are overall pretty joyous little guys, and they should be used as such. French speakers know what's up because their emoji usage has the most positive overall sentiment at 86 percent positive. They're also the least negative with negative sentiment coming in at 7 percent. On the flip side, Malaysians are the least positive at 60 percent positive, while U.S. Spanish speakers are the more negative with 22 percent of emoji usage having a negative sentiment.
Along those lines, French speakers also use heart emojis way more than anybody else, to the tune of four times the average. In fact, French is the only language where happy faces is not the leading emoji category. Hey, they don't call French the language of love for nothing.
Overall, the top five categories of emoji among all SwiftKey users are happy faces (44.8 percent), sad faces (14.33 percent), hearts (12.5 percent), hand gestures (5.3 percent) and romance (2.4 percent). However you feel about the current world domination of emojis, it's nice to know that people are generally using them for kind purposes, isn't it?
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