Exploring Emoji Use and Frequency Among Mongolian Users: Examples from Facebook and Twitter

Abstract

Internet linguistics has been rapidly improving since the advent of the Internet; humanity has come to value or emphasize a new form of communication, the Internet, or computer-mediated communication (CMC) around the world. Emoji is a graphical image, representing attitudes or concepts, and emotional feelings in a simple way. Emojis became popular around 2010 worldwide and can be used on any smartphone or computer in a message or conversation. Dresner & Herring stated that some social factors include the gender and the age of CMD users (2010). Emoji is one of people’s emotional and facial expressions, and its use exceeds the standard norm of the language, especially on Facebook and Twitter, known as the most used platforms in Mongolian internet communication. We have studied one of the sociolinguistics studies, the emoji use on Facebook and Twitter in Mongolian computer-mediated discourse, also known as conversational discourse, comparing people’s age, gender, emoji use, and frequency through the questionnaire we processed. The findings of the study show that people write online using excessive emojis, which means that emojis have become an integral part of people’s everyday life. Following excessive use of emojis, there is a fear that may lead to language extinction, and the spelling rules may be compromised, which could adversely affect the official written language. We hope that this study will contribute to the scholarly literature on computer-mediated discourse in general, Mongolian computer-mediated discourse in particular, and the emoji use and its frequency, a recently introduced in our country and a little-studied feature of computer-mediated discourse.